Ghent University

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

“The burden of being alive”

A Trauma-Theoretical Reading of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

Supervisor

Dr. Stef Craps

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of

the requirements for the degree of ―Licentiaat

in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Germaanse Talen‖

by Eline Van de Voorde

May, 2007

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 3

Introduction 4

Chapter 1: What is Trauma? 6

Chapter 2: Reactions to Trauma in The Things They Carried 17

Chapter 3: O‘Brien Illustrates the Isolation of the Veteran 28

Chapter 4: Recovery and Testimony 37

Chapter 5: Creating Confusion 52

Chapter 6: Telling a True War Story 62

Chapter 7: Style and the Use of Metaphor 80

Conclusion 90

Works Consulted 92

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Acknowledgments

This dissertation could not have been realized without the support and the encouragement

from a lot of people. I am grateful for the corrections and guidelines my supervisor Dr. Stef

Craps has given me, and also for showing me where to look for the right sources. I also want

to thank my friends and family for their encouragement and their critical reading of my

dissertation.

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Introduction

Before giving an outline of my dissertation I want to give some information about the novel

The Things They Carried by Tim O‘Brien. The novel consists of twenty-two short stories that

were first published in magazines and Tim O‘Brien incorporated and changed the stories in

the book. He often changes the stories of his novels in new editions and there is a difference

between the paperback and hardback versions. I have read a paperback version of The Things

They Carried published by Flamingo, so the version I read may differ slightly from other

versions of the book. Although the novel is made up of different short stories that can be read

separately as they were published at first in magazines, the book is not just a collection of

short stories. Every story is connected to the other stories and to fully understand the novel we

have to compare the events that are described in the different stories. The short stories of the

novel are told by the narrator-protagonist, who is called Tim O‘Brien. He reflects on his

experiences with his platoon during the Vietnam War. The different members of the platoon

are: Tim O‘Brien; Kiowa; Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the platoon leader; Bob ―Rat‖ Kiley, a

medic; Norman Bowker; Henry Dobbins; Mitchell Sanders; Curt Lemon; Azar; Dave Jensen:

Lee Strunk; Bobby Jorgenson, the replacement medic for Rat Kiley. When I quote The Things

They Carried in my text I will indicate the source with ‗TTTC‘ to make it recognizable. For

the title of my dissertation I have taken a quotation, ―the burden of being alive‖, from The

Things They Carried page 16. With this dissertation I will try to establish a link between the

theory of trauma and the novel The Things They Carried. I have chosen this subject because I

am interested in literature and psychology. It will be interesting to see how this novel reflects

on the Vietnam War, and how it is situated in the trauma theory, and to which extent the

author bases his work on his own experiences. In the first chapter I will look at a definition

and some symptoms of trauma. The definitions and the symptoms will be tested against the

stories of The Things They Carried. I will try to establish which elements of trauma are

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present in the novel and look at how the author incorporates them in his novel. In the second

chapter I will focus on three characters of the novel, namely Norman Bowker, Tim O‘Brien

and Jimmy Cross. They each deal with and react to trauma in their own way. These three

different ways of reacting will be tested against the theories of possible ways to react to

trauma. In the third chapter I will look at what the effects are of the traumas of the Vietnam

War. I will try to prove that the Vietnam War has an isolating effect on the characters in the

story and that they do not see a justification of their actions in Vietnam. This causes an

enormous sense of alienation and it becomes clear that those who do not have support from

friends and family will not be reintegrated in society. In chapter 4 I will explain how a trauma

survivor has to regain control over his life and recover from the traumatic experience. The

element of testimony is very important in that phase and I will focus on how O‘Brien tells his

story and what are essential features of a trauma story. Because telling a story is a form of

witnessing I will further expand on the different kinds of witnesses and the different levels of

witnessing in a traumatic event. The theory of witnessing will be applied to the novel. In the

following chapter, chapter 5, I want to show how Tim O‘Brien creates confusion about the

content of his stories. I will show that some elements of the story are based on reality and the

author tries to increase the believability of his stories only to break it down. In chapter 6 the

aim is to show how O‘Brien imitates the insecurity and unknowability of a traumatic event. I

will use the example of the section ―How To Tell a True War Story‖ which shows how a true

war story, and also a trauma story should be written according to the narrator. In the final

chapter I will try to give some examples of style that are used in the novel. I will try to prove

that the author is very conscious about his style and I want to find out if the style of the novel

mimics the traumatic experience.

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Chapter 1: What is Trauma?

The Things They Carried is a literary description of the traumatic experiences of combat

soldiers during the Vietnam war. If we want to understand The Things They Carried, we need

to look at the theory of trauma. O‘Brien uses trauma as a medium in his book, but also as an

important theme. The title of the book already introduces the theme of trauma. The narrator

talks about the things soldiers have to carry with them during the war, ―the things‖ in the two

senses of the word, literally and figuratively, their physical and mental burden. In the first

story of the novel ―The Things They Carried‖ the narrator gives a description of different

objects the men carried with them, mostly weapons and food. He also describes the personal

objects certain soldiers have with them. For instance Ted Lavender‘s tranquillisers, Lieutenant

Cross‘ pictures of the girl he loves. Steven Kaplan points to the detailing of the different

objects, almost a scientific description. The academic, scientific language expresses the reality

and the certainty of the things to carry (Kaplan N. pag.). The most important and most

difficult thing they carried, was the psychological burden of the traumatic experiences of the

Vietnam War. The narrator tells: ―They shared the weight of memory. They took up what

others could no longer bear‖ (TTTC 12). The soldiers experienced horrible things: killing

people, witnessing people being killed. That shared experience of misery and guilt led them to

help each other in bearing this heavy burden. Therefore the platoon is very important for

coping with traumatic situations. The burden the soldiers have to carry seems to be the only

certainty in war. The narrator describes this as follows: ―[…] and for all the ambiguities of

Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that

they would never be at a loss for things to carry‖(TTTC 14).

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In order to analyse the trauma in The Things They Carried we need to define what trauma

exactly is. In Trauma and Recovery Judith Lewis Herman defines trauma from the finding

that when trauma emerges, the victim is in a helpless position: ―Traumatic events overwhelm

the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning‖

(Herman 33). Kalí Tal defines trauma as a ―transformative experience‖ (Worlds of Hurt 119).

The victim loses his innocence because of the trauma and he or she can never get it back (Tal,

Worlds of Hurt 119). Traumatic experiences are not uncommon. Especially soldiers are

victims of trauma. Traumatic experiences are different from other human experiences and

people react to trauma in a different way than to everyday events, because traumatic

experiences normally ―involve threats to life and bodily integrity, or a close personal

encounter with violence and death‖ (Herman 33). Traumatic events make the victim helpless,

through which he or she reacts in a certain way to the events. According to Herman a

traumatic reaction occurs, when there is no possibility of escape or resistance for the

threatened person. The traumatized person cannot respond to danger in the ordinary way. The

ordinary response to danger persists long after the danger has gone. Traumatic events cause

changes in ―physiological arousal, emotion, cognition and memory‖ (Herman 34). Traumatic

events also sever these functions, which are normally integrated, from each other. Herman‘s

conclusion is that the ―traumatized person may experience intense emotion without clear

memory of the event, or may remember everything in detail but without emotion. She may

find herself in a constant state of vigilance and irritability without knowing why. Traumatic

symptoms have a tendency to become disconnected from their source and to take on a life of

their own‖ (Herman 34).

In The Things They Carried O‘Brien gives an example of the inability to act upon the

situation at hand (TTTC 191-93). The narrator tells the story of how he was shot twice during

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the war. The second time was very traumatic for him, because a new medic, Bobby

Jorgenson, took a long time before attending to O‘Brien. Jorgenson was shocked by the

situation and could not act immediately. Only later Tim O‘Brien remembers the details of this

situation. He becomes obsessed by it and later on he plans to take revenge on the medic.

I‘d squirm around, cussing, half nuts with pain, and pretty soon I‘d start remembering how Bobby

Jorgenson had almost killed me. Shock, I‘d think – how could he forget to treat for shock? I‘d

remember how long it took him to get to me, and how his fingers were all jerky and nervous, and the

way his lips kept twitching under that ridiculous little moustache. The nights were miserable.

Sometimes I‘d roam around the base. I‘d head down to the wire and stare out at the darkness, out where

the war was, and think up ways to make Bobby Jorgensen feel exactly what I felt. I wanted to hurt him.

(TTTC 193-94)

Not being immediately helped by Jorgenson is very traumatic for O‘Brien. Feeling powerless

and helpless, for his life is in the hands of the medic, he begins to blame Jorgenson for the

fact that he was shot. The reader sees the situation differently, he understands that Jorgenson

too feels powerless in this situation, paralysed as the medic is by the horror that he is

witnessing. For him too the situation is traumatizing.

The Vietnam War was traumatic for many reasons, different from the traumatic experiences

of the Second World War for example. The enemy in Vietnam was invisible, and every

civilian could be a member of the Vietcong, i.e. an enemy:

Again and again in Vietnam novels, the protagonist/narrator emphasizes the impossibility of

distinguishing ―friendly‖ civilians from National Liberation Front partisans. The soldier‘s desire to

survive leads him to see all Vietnamese as the enemy, and to take the offensive whenever he has the

opportunity. But violence is useless when everyone is your enemy. There is simply no place to hold and

defend. (Tal, Worlds of Hurt 139)

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The American newsmagazine Time published in 1985, ten years after theVietnam War ended,

a survey of that war. Lance Morrow describes how frustrating the invisibility of the enemy

was for the soldiers.

The enemy had been invisible in an earlier part of the war, hiding in jungles, in tunnels, ghosting around

in the pre-dawn: killer shadows. They dissolved by day into the villages, into the other Vietnamese.

They maddened the Americans with the mystery of who they were – the unseen man who shot from the

tree line, or laid a wire across the trail with a Claymore mine at the other end, the mama-san who did the

wash, the child concealing a grenade. (Morrow 20)

Another reason for the traumatic complexity of the Vietnam War is the protest the war

provoked in the United States. There was a lot of protest from students and from veterans.

When soldiers came home from Vietnam they were not welcomed as heroes like the veterans

of the Second World War had been. In the eyes of a growing part of the population they had

not fought for a good cause and the greater good. For the protesters there had been no purpose

to this war. The antiwar movement was not the monopoly of the civilian population, the

veterans themselves protested against the war. Their protest was more painful and inflicting,

for they had fought in this war and by protesting they were forced to realize that they had

killed for no reason and that their actions during the war had been immoral. There was no

justification for the Vietnam war, and the veterans were aware of this. Kalí Tal says that the

protest of the veterans came at a great personal cost: ―Their condemnation of the American

policy in Vietnam contained an implicit criticism of their own complicity in acts of brutality

and atrocity‖ (Worlds of Hurt 129).

In 1981 Michael Maclear writes in The Ten Thousand Day War that ―a decade after the

United States had ceased combat in Vietnam, almost two-thirds of the Americans who served

there, or 1,750,000 soldiers, are officially described as in need of psychiatric counselling‖

(Maclear xiv). Heberle recognizes different traumatic symptoms in the form and style of The

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Things They Carried: ―Traumatic episodes all, their representations are fittingly marked by

fragmentation, violation of chronology, intrusiveness and repetition‖ (Heberle 196). Kalí Tal

also recognizes that fragmentation, ―drawing together fragments into a whole‖ (Tal, Worlds

of Hurt 137) and ―re-piecing a shattered self‖(Tal, Worlds of Hurt 138), is a common feature

in the literature of trauma. In Trauma and Recovery Herman describes the different symptoms

of trauma. The author divides the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder into three

categories: ―hyperarousal‖, ―intrusion‖ and ―constriction‖ (Herman 35). Hyperarousal is

described as follows:

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go on permanent alert, as

if the danger might return at any moment. Physiological arousal continues unabated. In this state of

hyperarousal, which is the first cardinal symbol of post-traumatic stress disorder, the traumatized person

startles easily, reacts irritably to small provocations, and sleeps poorly. (Herman, 35)

Herman quotes Roy Grinker and John Spiegel who analysed the behaviour of soldiers of the

Second World War and came to the conclusion that the subjective fear of these soldiers

declined when they were taken out of the situation of stress. However, they were not able to

have ―a life of safety and security‖ (Herman 36), because the physiological phenomena did

not go away. Several studies show ―that psychophysiological changes of post-traumatic stress

disorder are both extensive and enduring‖ (Herman 36).

Next to hyperarousal symptoms Herman distinguishes intrusive symptoms. The traumatized

patient is forced to relive the traumatic event, although this event is in the past and does not

pose a threat to the traumatized anymore. The patient has intrusive flashbacks and traumatic

nightmares. Because of the intrusive reliving of the trauma, the traumatized person cannot

have a normal development. Victims are fixated on their trauma. Herman also points out that

traumatic memories have unusual qualities: ―They are not encoded like the ordinary memories

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of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story‖ (37).

Furthermore these memories do not have a verbal narrative or context. The memories are

saved in the form of vivid sensations and images. Robert Jay Lifton calls these images

―indelible images‖ (qtd. in Herman 38). Because the experience is fragmented and based on

images without context, the traumatic memories seem more real. These images both belong to

the past and the present. They are events of the past, but because the victim relives them, they

become present for him or her. Herman gives an example of such a traumatic memory that she

has taken from Tim O‘Brien‘s The Things They Carried:

I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that

must have been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty

years later is Dave Jensen singing ‗Lemon Tree‘ as we threw down the parts. (TTTC 78-79)

In this passage O‘Brien is describing how another soldier died, hit by a booby trap. The

images of that event still wake O‘Brien up with fragments of the experience: he sees parts of

the body and hears a soldier singing when they cleaned up the body parts. This experience

still affects him twenty years later. All of the stories of The Things They Carried are made up

of similar intrusive memories. We can see that the style of the novel mimics traumatization

(Heberle 14). In his novel O‘Brien tells the stories and the experiences in the way he

remembers them at the moment of his writing. Throughout his book many stories come back

and are commented on, but written down in another moment and context the stories change.

Just as traumatic memories are not the same as ordinary memories, traumatic dreams are

different from ordinary dreams. Traumatic dreams have many of the same features of

traumatic memory. Traumatic dreams consist of fragments of the traumatic events and they

are often repeated. The traumatized person often experiences these dreams as if they happen

at that moment. And they can occur in stages of sleep in which people normally do not dream:

―Thus, in sleep as well as in waking life, traumatic memories appear to be based in an altered

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neurophysiological organization‖ (Herman 39). Although traumatic dreams are very common

with traumatized people, the narrator of The Things They Carried claims not to have such

nightmares:

For years I‘d felt a certain smugness about how easily I had made the shift from war to peace. A nice

smooth glide – no flashbacks or midnight sweats. The war was over, after all. And the thing to do was

go on. So I took pride in sliding gracefully from Vietnam to graduate school, from Chu Lai to Harvard,

from one world to another. In ordinary conversation I never spoke much about the war, certainly not in

detail, and yet ever since my return I had been talking about it virtually non-stop through my writing.

Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat. (TTTC 156-57)

He did not have nightmares, he says, but he has realized that this does not mean that he has

come out of the war unharmed. His stories constantly deal with his experiences of the war.

The different experiences are told in the different stories.

Trauma patients also relive the traumatic experience in their actions: ―Adults as well as

children feel impelled to re-create the moment of terror, either in literal or in disguised form‖

(Herman 39). This re-enactment can happen consciously or unconsciously. Often the re-

enactment is unconscious: traumatized people re-enact some aspects of trauma without

knowing it. This unconscious striving for re-enactment can be dangerous, because it can incite

the traumatized to seek dangerous situations. However, it is not always dangerous: ―Survivors

may find a way to integrate reliving experiences into their lives in a contained, even socially

useful manner‖(Herman 40). In the story ―Field Trip‖ O‘Brien talks about his journey to

Vietnam. He describes his visit to the field where a soldier, Kiowa, died. He goes back

because he hopes it will resolve some of his trauma: ―A FEW MONTHS AFTER completing

―In the Field,‘ I returned with my daughter to Vietnam, where we visited the site of Kiowa‘s

death, and where I looked for signs of forgiveness or personal grace or whatever the land

might offer. The field was there, though not as I remembered it‖ (TTTC 183). O‘Brien

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realizes that he has to come to terms with the death of his friend. It affected him more than he

had realized. He goes to the field where Kiowa drowned and he goes into the water. He tries

to relive the night that Kiowa died. The reliving has a positive outcome, he feels uplifted

when he comes out of the water. The world starts to make sense again:

I wanted to tell Kiowa that he‘d been a great friend, the very best, but all I could do was slap hands with

the water. The sun made me squint. Twenty years. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never. In a way maybe

I‘d gone under with Kiowa, and now after two decades I‘d finally worked my way out. A hot afternoon,

a bright august sun, and the war was over. For a few moments I could not bring myself to move. Like

waking from a summer nap, feeling lazy and sluggish, the world collecting itself around me. (TTTC

187)

According to Herman, re-enactments are uncanny: ―Even when they are consciously chosen,

they have a feeling of involuntariness. Even when they are not dangerous, they have a driven

tenacious quality‖ (Herman 41). Trauma theorists see intrusion as an attempt by the patient to

heal. The traumatized spontaneously tries to integrate the traumatic experience (Herman 41).

Although intrusion is an attempt to heal the trauma, the survivors mostly do not chose to

relive the trauma. It scares the survivor, because reliving the trauma brings back the

overwhelming feelings of rage and fear that the survivor felt during the traumatic experience

(Herman 42).

Because reliving a traumatic experience provokes such intense emotional distress, traumatized people

go to great lengths to avoid it. The effort to ward off intrusive symptoms, though self-protective in

intent, further aggravates the post-traumatic syndrome, for the attempt to avoid reliving the trauma too

often results in a narrowing of consciousness, a withdrawal from engagement with others, and an

impoverished life. (Herman 42)

Next to hyperarousal and intrusive symptoms Herman sees a third category of symptoms of

post-traumatic stress disorder: constriction. ―When a person is completely powerless, and any

form of resistance is futile, she may go into a state of surrender. The system of self-defense

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shuts down entirely. The helpless person escapes from her situation not by action in the real

world but rather by altering her state of consciousness‖ (Herman 42). Constriction is also

called numbing: the perceptions of the traumatized person are ―numbed or distorted‖ (Herman

43). The survivor has another sense of time. In his perception the events occur in slow motion

and not in ordinary reality. Often the person experiences the traumatic event as if he or she is

watching it from the outside. He or she is not experiencing the event him- or herself. In The

Things They Carried for instance the narrator describes this feeling of detachment when he

tells about his flight to Canada:

Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of the summer didn‘t happen in

some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you‘ve lived it, and where it goes afterward.

None of it ever seemed real. During my time at the Tip Top lodge I had the feeling I‘d slipped out of my

own skin, hovering a few feet away while some poor yo-yo with my name and face tried to make his

way toward a future he didn‘t understand and didn‘t want. Even now I can see myself as I was then. It‘s

like watching an old home movie. (TTTC 50)

Herman calls this phenomenon of ―indifference, emotional detachment and profound

passivity‖ (Herman 43) ―an altered state of consciousness‖( Herman 43), that ought to protect

the survivor from the enormous pain of the traumatic experience. This was apparent from the

journalistic interviews during the Vietnam War. I found in the American magazine Life of the

9 June 1969, the year O‘Brien was in Vietnam, an interview with a twenty-three year old

soldier returned from his tour of duty:

―So many of our people were dead at the end of each week,‖ recalls Ken Willis, 23, now at Fort Dix.

―You begin to feel you‘ve been in Vietnam all your life. You‘re a machine, only capable of reacting to

booby traps. You feel you‘re hanging on a string and somebody may cut that string. Emotionally and

psychologically you‘re running away from the situation, but physically you‘re stuck there.‖ (―An

Extraordinary Military Dilemma‖ 48)

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Not all survivors have the ability of spontaneous ―dissociation‖ ( Herman 44), therefore many

of them search the numbing effect in alcohol and narcotics. It is a fact that drug and alcohol

abuse do not help them: on the contrary, it makes things worse. Because of the drug abuse the

survivor becomes even more alienated from his or her environment (Herman 44). The

phenomenon of dissociation keeps the traumatic experience from being integrated.

Although dissociative alterations in consciousness, or even intoxication, may be adaptive at the moment

of total helplessness, they become maladaptive once the danger is past. Because these altered states

keep the traumatic experience walled off from ordinary consciousness, they prevent the integration

necessary for healing. (Herman 45)

Herman refers to Kardiner for stating that, because the traumatic memories are kept out of

normal consciousness, only a fragment of the memory ―emerges as an intrusive

symptom‖(Herman 45). The constriction also occurs on the level of action and initiative. The

survivor restricts his or her life in order to get some sense of safety and to control his or her

fear. (Herman 46)

In avoiding any situations reminiscent of the past trauma, or any initiative that might involve future

planning and risk, traumatized people deprive themselves of those new opportunities for successful

coping that might mitigate the effect of the traumatic experience. Thus, constrictive symptoms, though

they may represent an attempt to defend against overwhelming states, exact a high price for whatever

protection they afford. They narrow and deplete the quality of life and ultimately perpetuate the effects

of the traumatic event. (Herman 47)

A traumatic experience is followed by the alternation between intrusion and constriction. This

is the most characteristic feature of post-traumatic stress disorder. The alternation between

these two extremes can be seen as an attempt of the survivor to ―find a satisfactory balance

between the two‖( Herman 47). But this alternation does not create the balance the

traumatized person looks for.

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The instability produced by these periodic alternations further exacerbates the traumatized person‘s

sense of unpredictability and helplessness. The dialectic of trauma is therefore potentially

selfperpetuating. ( Herman 47)

Intrusive symptoms emerge most prominently in the first few days or weeks following the traumatic

event, abate to some degree within three or six months, and then attenuate slowly over time. (Herman

47)

Symptoms of trauma can fade over time, but it is possible that they are revived years after the

traumatic event. The victim can be reminded of the original trauma (Herman 48).

As intrusive symptoms diminish, numbing or constrictive symptoms come to predominate. The

traumatized person may no longer seem frightened and may resume the outward forms of her previous

life. But the severing of events from their ordinary meanings and the distortion in the sense of reality

persist. She may complain that she is just going through the motions of living, as if she were observing

the events of daily life from a great distance. (Herman 48)

Such constrictive symptoms are not immediately recognised, because the significance of the

symptoms lies in what is not there. Often these people do not get the diagnosis of post-

traumatic stress disorder, because the symptoms are overlooked. The symptoms are often seen

as specific characteristics of the victim‘s personality (Herman 49). ―Long after the event,

many traumatized people feel that a part of themselves has died. The most profoundly

afflicted wish that they were dead‖ (Herman 49). Suicide is often linked to severe trauma, but

this issue raises a lot of controversy. Mortality studies show that there is in fact a link between

combat trauma and suicide. It seems that combat trauma increases the risk of suicide. ―Thus,

the very ―threat of annihilation‖ that defined the traumatic moment may pursue the survivor

long after the danger has passed‖ (Herman 50).

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Chapter 2: Reactions to Trauma in The Things They Carried

Janet argues that people have different kinds of memory: ―habit memory‖, ―narrative

memory‖ and ―traumatic memory‖ (qtd. in Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 160).

―Janet distinguished narrative memory from the automatic integration of new information without much

conscious attention to what is happening. This automatic synthesis, or habit memory […] is a capacity

humans have in common with animals. Ordinary or narrative memory, however, is a uniquely human

capacity. In order to memorize well, one must pay special attention to what is going on. Narrative

memory consists of mental constructs, which people use to make sense out of experience (e.g., Janet,

1928). Janet thought that the ease with which current experience is integrated into existing mental

structures depends on the subjective assessment of what is happening; familiar and expectable

experiences are automatically assimilated without much conscious awareness of details of the

particulars, while frightening or novel experiences may not easily fit into existing cognitive schemes

and either may be remembered with particular vividness or may totally resist integration. (Van der Kolk

and Van der Hart 160)

Habit memory stores elements unconsciously. Narrative memory stores experiences into our

world of experience. In traumatic memory experiences are stored literally, without the

possibility of thinking about it. The traumatic memories cannot be retrieved afterwards. The

memory of these experiences becomes ―dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary

control‖ (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 160). Traumatic memory stores unintegrated

experiences. What the victim of trauma has to do, is to transform the traumatic memory into

narrative memory.

Traumatic memories are the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences, which need to be

integrated with existing mental schemes, and be transformed into narrative language. It appears that, in

order for this to occur successfully, the traumatized person has to return to the memory often in order to

complete it. […] In the case of complete recovery, the person does not suffer anymore from the

reappearance of traumatic memories in the form of flashbacks, behavioral reenactments, and so on.

Instead the story can be told, the person can look back at what happened; he has given it a place in his

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life story, his autobiography, and thereby in the whole of his personality. (Van der Kolk and Van der

Hart 176)

It is important, as is apparent from the quotation above, that you give the traumatic experience

a place in your life. This happens when you try to form a chronological and logical story out

of the traumatic experience. La Capra names the process of getting over the trauma working-

through. The notion of working-through is different from Herman‘s notion, because the

victim has to avoid closure in his story. Trauma is recognized and told in a story, but this

story cannot be fixed and closed. The story has to be open for change, because a closed story

is easily forgotten and put in the past.

―Indeed, trauma is effected belatedly through repetition, for the numbingly traumatic event does not

register at the time of its occurrence but only after a temporal gap or period of latency, at which time it

is immediately repressed, split off or disavowed. Trauma then in some way may return compulsively as

the repressed. Working through the trauma brings the possibility of counteracting compulsive ―acting-

out‖ through a controlled, explicit, critically controlled process of repetition that significantly changes a

life by making possible the selective retrieval and modified enactment of unactualized past

possibilities.‖ (La Capra 174)

In The Things They Carried the protagonist is trying to integrate his trauma story into his life,

but the process is not yet finished and actually the protagonist does not want to make a fixed

story. It is open for reinterpretation. In this quote La Capra already mentions acting-out. This

is another reaction to trauma. We can distinguish three ways of reacting to trauma: working-

through (La Capra 193-194), acting-out (La Capra 175) and narrative fetishism (Santner 144).

La Capra calls the last reaction denial (La Capra 187). When a traumatized person has the

reaction of acting-out, he is in a process of continuing repetition of the trauma.

The second and complementary response tends to intentionally or unintentionally to aggravate trauma in

a largely symptomatic fashion. This may be done through a construction of all history (or at least all

modern history) as trauma and an insistence that there is no alternative to symptomatic acting-out and

the repetition compulsion other than an imaginary, illusory hope for totalization, full closure, and

redemptive meaning. Acting-out and the repetition compulsion are frequently related to an affirmation

19

or acknowledgement of posttraumatic fragmentation, disjunction, and instability wherein the

impossibility of any final unity or ―suture‖ may become tantamount to the unavailability or elusiveness

of any durable bonds or ―suturing‖ at all. (La Capra 193)

Narrative fetishism is a reaction designed to avoid the trauma. The trauma is repressed by a

story. The traumatic event is reinterpreted. The victim will pretend that the trauma has not had

any effect on him. The victim tries to pretend that he has not got a trauma. Often this is used

to reinterpret history, make the historical facts more bearable.

By narrative fetishism I mean the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or

unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being

in the first place. (Santner 144)

In The Things They Carried we can distinguish three reactions to trauma in three different

characters. The theory of the different reactions to trauma is not completely applicable to the

different characters of the book, but we can distinguish some typical elements of reacting to

trauma. The three characters are Tim O‘Brien, the narrator, Jimmy Cross, his platoon leader

in the Vietnam War, and Norman Bowker, another soldier. The three characters fought

together in the same platoon. These characters‘ reactions to trauma are described the most in

the novel. The narrator is the most important character of the story, and his ideas and feelings

are described in detail. He is constantly telling stories, and he talks about other books he has

written before. On page 12 I have quoted a passage in which the narrator talks about the

meaning of telling stories. Realizing that telling stories is his way of reacting to the trauma,

the narrator of The Things They Carried tries to work through his trauma. He is longing to

make a coherent story out of his traumatic experiences. He is trying to transform his traumatic

memory into narrative memory, however his aim is not to make a closed story. He does not

want to put his trauma in the past and forget about it. The narrator‘s narrative process is not

completely successful, because his stories lack chronology and he has not been able to give all

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his stories meaning. There are some stories that he had avoided to tell and that he is now

trying to work through. His stories still lack coherence. He has obviously not worked through

his trauma yet, but he has already started the process. He is aware that closure is not a good

way of resolving trauma. That is also why the narrator does not want his stories to be fixed.

He often retells stories, but each time from another point of view, or he changes the characters

of the story, so that it is not an exact repetition of the story he told before. He wants to be able

to show the horror of Vietnam, but without telling a story that has a solution or an uplifting

end. The story cannot be fixed, because if it was fixed it would be easy to forget. There would

be no need to think about it further, and forgetting is something that O‘Brien wants to avoid,

being afraid that it would be the same as repressing all of his experiences. Therefore it is the

intent of the narrator to mislead the reader, for whom it may never be clear which story is true

and which is not. The second character, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, has a tendency to repress

the trauma, during and after the war. There are two experiences that are really traumatic for

Cross. It concerns the death of two soldiers. Lieutenant Cross feels guilty for these deaths,

because he was their platoon leader and should have been more responsible and tried to avoid

the deaths of his men. One example is the story of the soldier Ted Lavender. He was shot

during a mission. The platoon had to investigate a Vietcong tunnel and blow it up. This is

described in detail in the book. The soldiers had to pick someone who had to go into the

tunnel and investigate it. This was considered very dangerous, so no one volunteered to do it.

They draw numbers and Lee Strunk was the one who had to go into the tunnel.

On April 16, when Lee Strunk drew the number 17, he laughed and muttered something and went down

quickly. The morning was hot and very still. Not good, Kiowa said. […] You win some, you lose some,

said Mitchell Sanders, and sometimes you settle for a rain check. It was a tired line and no one laughed.

Henry Dobbins ate a tropical chocolate bar. Ted Lavender popped a tranquilizer and went off to pee.

[…] A few moments later Lee Strunk crawled out of the tunnel.[…] Lee Strunk made a funny ghost

sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and right then, when Strunk made that high happy moaning

21

sound, when he went ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from

peeing.‖ (TTTC 10-11)

The fact that Lavender dies and Strunk lives is very ironic, because Lee Strunk‘s chances of

being killed in the tunnel were bigger than Lavender getting killed while peeing. This

illustrates how the soldiers in Vietnam could never be prepared for death and how invisible

their enemy was. Cross feels guilty for the death of Lavender, because he knows that he was

not attentive during the mission. He was thinking of his girl Martha (TTTC 10).

Lieutenant Cross kept to himself. He pictured Martha‘s smooth young face, thinking he loved her more

than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was dead because he loved her so much and

could not stop thinking about her. (TTTC 7)

He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than he loved his me, and as a consequence

Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for

the rest of the war. (TTTC 14)

He feels responsible for not looking out for his platoon, for, as told later in the story, he is not

strict enough and therefore he is not really a good leader. Even during action he is

preoccupied with the girl he is in love with. Another soldier under the command of Lieutenant

Cross, Kiowa, dies because the platoon had set camp in a field, which turned out to be ―the

village toilet‖ (TTTC 145). The locals had warned the platoon that it was a bad place to set up

camp, but Lieutenant Cross did not listen to them and set up camp anyway. The field is

described as big and swampy. When they had set up camp, it started to rain and it kept on

raining and then they realised that the field was used as the ‗village toilet‘.

But the rain kept getting worse. And by midnight the field turned into soup. […] ‗But the worst part,‘ he

would‘ve said quietly, ‗was the smell. Partly it was the river – a dead-fish smell – but it was something

else, too. Finally somebody figured it out. What this was, it was a shit field. The village toilet. No

indoor plumbing, right ? So they used the field. I mean, we were camped in a goddamn shit field.

(TTTC 145)

At a certain moment, the field seemed to explode. Kiowa was sucked into the field and

drowned. Lieutenant Cross had camped in the field, because he was ordered to and he did not

22

question this. This again is ironic, because for once Cross is strict and follows the commands

and then somebody dies. Although Kiowa‘s death was totally unexpected, it could have been

prevented.

Twenty-four years old and his heart wasn‘t in it. Military matters meant nothing to him. He did not care

one way or the other about the war, and he had no desire to command, and even after all these months in

the bush, all the days and nights, even the he did not know enough to keep his men out of a shit field.

[…] He should‘ve known. No excuses. […] But it was a war, and he had his orders, (TTTC 167)

Cross wants to apologize to Kiowa‘s father and write him a letter. ―Lieutenant Jimmy Cross

felt something tighten inside him. In the letter to Kiowa‘s father he would apologize point-

blank. Just admit to the blunders. He would place the blame where it belongs‖ (TTTC 168).

Eventually Cross does not write a letter. By not doing it he avoids the reality, like he always

does.

Near the center of the field First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross squatted in the muck, almost entirely

submerged. In his head he was revising the letter to Kiowa‘s father. Impersonal this time. An officer

expressing an officer‘s condolences. No apologies were necessary, because in fact it was one of these

freak things, and the war was full of freaks, and nothing could ever change it anyway. Which was the

truth, he thought. The exact truth. Lieutenant Cross went deeper into the muck, the dark water at his

throat, and tried to tell himself it was the truth. (TTTC 173)

He does not want or cannot face the trauma, and therefore he retreats back into his

imagination.

He was back home in New Jersey. A golden afternoon on the golf course, the fairways lush and green,

and he was teeing it up on the first hole. It was a world without responsibility. When the war was over,

he thought, maybe the he would write a letter to Kiowa‘s father. Or maybe not. Maybe he would just

take a couple of practice swings and knock the ball down the middle and pick up his clubs and walk off

into the afternoon. (TTTC 175)

There is a specific evolution in the mind of Cross. In the first letter, he wants to write, Cross

has the intention to admit guilt and explain what really happened. He is trying to confront his

trauma and his guilt. But this does not take long, because he revises the letter, in his mind, and

23

makes it impersonal. He just wants to offer his condolences and that will be it, because he

could not have known what would happen. Besides things like that happen in a war. He is

trying to convince himself of this, although at the same time he doubts this: he ―tried to tell

himself that it was the truth‖(TTTC 173). He wants to repress the trauma and the blame, in the

knowledge that he carries part of the blame. When he is back home, he decides that maybe he

will write a letter or maybe not. At the end he chooses to forget the whole incident, deceiving

himself that he lives in ―a world without responsibility‖(TTTC 175), what overrules the need

to write Kiowa‘s father a letter. No responsibility, no apology. He tries to repress everything

that happened in the war and just goes on with his life. When Cross visits O‘Brien he again

tries to forget the horrible things, although they still haunt him. He still has not forgiven

himself for his mistakes, but he tries to hide this. When they are looking at a picture of Ted

Lavender Cross admits that he has not forgiven himself for his death. ―It was something that

would never go away, he said quietly, and I nodded and told him I felt the same about certain

things‖ (TTTC 25). When O‘Brien tells Cross that he wants to write a story, his former

platoon commander Cross asks O‘Brien to make a hero out of him and insists not to mention

Lavender‘s death in the story. Although he does not even mention Lavender‘s name, O‘Brien

understands what Cross means.

For the rest of his visit I steered the conversation away from Martha. At the end, though, as we were

walking out to his car, I told him that I‘d like to write a story about some of this. Jimmy thought it over

and then gave me a little smile. ‗Why not?‘ he said. ‗Maybe she‘ll read it and come begging. There‘s

always hope, right?‘ ‗Right‘, I said. He got into his car and rolled down the window. ‗Make me out to

be a good guy, okay? Brave and handsome, all that stuff. Best platoon leader ever.‘ He hesitated for a

second. ‗And do me a favour. Don‘t mention anything about –‘ ‗No,‘ I said, ‗I won‘t.‘(TTTC 26-27)

Cross‘s reaction to the war is that of narrative fetishism. He obviously denies and represses

the horror of the war. He even tries to exclude trauma in O‘Brien‘s story. In the mind of Cross

only the heroic elements of the war are fit to be mentioned in O‘Brien‘s story. Cross does not

24

mourn the loss of Kiowa, Lavender and his whole war past. Cross avoids mourning and he is

fixated once again on Martha, the girl he longed for, during the war. He still wants her to be

his girlfriend. He is going back to the person he was before the war, and by doing this he is

erasing his traumatic past. The loss he has undergone is not the loss of his friends and the loss

of part of his identity, but the loss of a girl. He can forget his war past and go on with his life.

It is obvious that Cross is living in a fantasy world, just as he did during the war, while the

things he is trying so hard to avoid are impossible to erase. The traumas of the war still jump

up in his mind, but he pretends that he does not think about them anymore. He only fools

himself, he cannot fool O‘Brien who knows what Cross is thinking about.

Norman Bowker feels guilty for the death of Kiowa, just like Cross, but for different reasons.

In The Things They Carried O‘Brien dedicated a whole story, ―Speaking of Courage‖, to

Norman Bowker and his trauma. The story shows Bowker back in his hometown, really

traumatized and unable to talk to anybody, not even to his father. He feels that no one would

understand his stories anyway, because they have not lived them. He closes himself off from

everyone else and he tries to cope with his trauma on his own.

A good war story, he thought, but it was not a war for war stories, not for talk of valor, and nobody

wanted to know about the terrible stink. They wanted good intentions and good deeds. But the town was

not to blame, really. It was a nice little town, very prosperous, with neat houses and sanitary

conveniences. (TTTC 148)

When Bowker tells the story of Kiowa‘s death, the first thing he mentions is that he has not

been brave, otherwise he could have saved Kiowa. When Kiowa drowned, Bowker lay next

too him. He had just shown Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend and Kiowa sat up straight and

then he sank into the field. Bowker is certain that if he had not shown the picture, Kiowa

would not have died. And he feels really guilty, because he could not pull Kiowa out of the

muck. He feels he should have been able to do that.

25

He would‘ve talked about this, and how he grabbed Kiowa by the boot and tried to pull him out. He

pulled hard but Kiowa was gone, and suddenly he felt himself going too. He could taste it. The shit was

in his nose and eyes. There were flares and mortar rounds, and the stink was everywhere – it was inside

him, in his lungs – and he could no longer tolerate it. Not here, he thought. Not like this. He released

Kiowa‘s boot and watched it slide away. […] ‗I didn‘t flip out‘, he would‘ve said. ‗I was cool. If things

had gone right, if it hadn‘t been for that smell, I could‘ve won the Silver Star.‘ (TTTC 148)

Although Bowker almost killed himself trying to save Kiowa, he still thinks that it was not

enough. In his opinion he could have been braver still. During the war he has often told the

story to the other soldiers, although he struggled to tell it: ―He could not describe what

happened next, not ever, but he would‘ve tried anyway‖ (TTTC 148). After the war Bowker

writes a letter to O‘Brien in which he describes how he feels. He cannot find a meaning in his

life. He is not able to keep a job and have a normal life.

Combat soldiers, as I already mentioned earlier, often have the feeling that they have ‗died‘

during the war. ―Long after the event, many traumatized people feel that a part of themselves

has died. The most profoundly afflicted wish that they were dead‖ (Herman 49). Bowker

describes this feeling. The death of his friend and many other things that happened in Vietnam

made such an impression that he has the feeling that he left a part of himself there. Kiowa‘s

death is, as it seems, an important point in Bowker‘s trauma he cannot let go. Bowker will

eventually see no other solution than to take his own life to release himself from his trauma.

Suicide is not uncommon with traumatized combat soldiers. There is a link between combat

trauma and suicide. In his letter to O‘Brien he asks the narrator to write a story about him.

Bowker feels unable to tell his story, because he does not know what exactly to say. He hopes

that O‘Brien will be able to make a good story.

What you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in that shithole.

A guy who can‘t get his act together and just drives around town all day and can‘t think of any damn

26

place to go and doesn‘t know how to get there anyway. This guy wants to talk about it, but he can‘t… If

you want, you can use the stuff in this letter. (But not my real name, okay?) (TTTC 156)

Bowker actually asks O‘Brien to work through the trauma for him, for he himself cannot turn

his trauma into a coherent narrative. For doing it he is relying on O‘Brien. O‘Brien has to

write down Bowker‘s experience, while only Bowker can manage it. He has experienced it in

his own way and no one else will ever be able to write the perfect story for Bowker. The story

is destined to fail. When O‘Brien has written the story, changing Norman Bowker‘s name to

Paul Berlin, Bowker is disappointed and O‘Brien too. O‘Brien feels a sense of failure when

the story is finished. He did not give the exact details of the story, i.e. the shit field and

Kiowa‘s death were left out the story. The piece missed ―the terrible killing power of that shit

field‖ (TTTC 158). O‘Brien describes Bowker‘s reaction of disappointment:

His reaction was short and somewhat bitter. ‗It‘s not terrible,‘ he wrote me, ‗but you left out Vietnam.

Where‘s kiowa? Where‘s the shit?‘ Eight months later he hanged himself. In August of 1978 his mother

sent me a brief not explaining what had happened. He‘d been playing pick-up basketball at the Y; after

two hours he went off for a drink of water; he used a jump rope; his friends found him hanging from a

water pipe. There was no suicide note, no message of any kind. ‗Norman was a quiet boy,‘ his mother

wrote, ‗and I don‘t suppose he wanted to bother anybody.‘ Now a decade after his death, I‘m hoping

that ‗Speaking of Courage‘ makes good on Norman Bowker‘s silence. And I hope it‘s a better story.

Although the old structure remains, the piece has been substantially revised, in some places by severe

cutting, in other places by the addition of new material. Norman is back in the story, where he belongs,

and I don‘t think he would mind that his real name appears. The central incident – our long night in the

shit field along the Song Tra Bong – has been restored to the piece. It was hard stuff to write. Kiowa,

after all, had been a close friend, and for years I‘ve avoided thinking about his death and my own

complicity in it. Even here it‘s not easy. In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that

Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a

failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is

my own. (TTTC 158-59)

27

O‘Brien takes part of the blame for Bowker‘s death. He even feels guilty, because he did not

tell the story right. Directly after O‘Brien describes Bowker‘s reaction, he writes ―Eight

months later he hanged himself‖(TTTC 158), implying that there is a link between the terrible

story and Bowker‘s suicide. Actually there is no link, and the reader sees it, because Bowker

only killed himself eight months after he read the story. Rationally anyone would see that you

do not kill yourself because of a story. The reader does not know what went on in Bowker‘s

mind and never will. Still, O‘Brien wants to rectify the situation and tries to write the story

Bowker would have wanted to tell. He tries to resolve Bowker‘s trauma and in this way also

his own, because he avoided thinking about Kiowa‘s death for a long time.

28

Chapter 3: O’Brien Illustrates the Isolation of the Veteran

In ―How to Tell a True War Story‖ in the novel The Things They Carried Tim O‘Brien

describes the alienation of the traumatized person:

For the common soldier… war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and

permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no

longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty,

law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can‘t tell where you are, or why

you‘re there, and the only certainty is ambiguity. In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your

sense of truth itself, and therefore it‘s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

(TTTC 78)

When a person is traumatized, he or she loses connection with other people, for he loses ―her

basic sense of self‖ (Herman 52). Connections with fellow men determine one‘s sense of self,

they help develop one‘s personality. A person develops a positive sense of self as a child. The

child‘s caretakers give the child a certain feeling of self-esteem and a sense of autonomy

when they respect the child‘s individuality and dignity. The child‘s autonomy enables the

child to learn to control his or her own bodily functions and to express his or her own point of

view. ―Traumatic events violate the autonomy of the person at the level of basic bodily

integrity‖ (Herman 52-53). The person loses his or her control over the bodily functions. This

is a very humiliating experience for the victim.

Unsatisfactory resolution of the normal developmental conflicts over autonomy leaves the person prone

to shame and doubt. These same emotional reactions reappear in the aftermath of traumatic events.

Shame is a response to helplessness, the violation of bodily integrity, and the indignity suffered in the

eyes of another person. Doubt reflects the inability to maintain one‘s own separate point of view while

remaining in connection with others. In the aftermath of traumatic events, survivors doubt both others

and themselves. Things are no longer what they seem. (Herman 53)

Herman quotes Tim O‘Brien to illustrate this point. She takes a passage, the already

mentioned passage, from the short story ―How to Tell a True War Story‖.

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In the development of a child, growing competence and capacity for initiative are added to the

positive self-image. ―Traumatic events, by definition, thwart initiative and overwhelm

individual competence‖(Herman 53). The victim is unable to act or prevent disaster. When the

traumatic event is over, the victim feels guilty and inferior. Robert Jay Lifton calls it ―survivor

guilt‖(qtd. in Herman 53). ―Guilt may be understood as an attempt to draw some useful lesson

from disaster and to regain some sense of control. To imagine that one could have done better

may be more tolerable than to face the reality of utter helplessness‖(Herman 53-54).

Survivors of war are often haunted by images of the death of people they should have rescued.

They feel that they should have risked their lives to save others. Witnessing the death of a

companion or of a family member creates a higher risk for post-traumatic stress disorder

(Herman 54). The example of Bowker‘s guilt (TTTC 147-48) is an obvious example of

survivor guilt. The idea that he could have saved Kiowa increased his trauma. This is a heavy

burden Bowker and other soldiers have to bear. They are still alive, while others died, and it

does not seem fair. All the soldiers who saw their colleagues die and who survived probably

suffer from survivor guilt. Also O‘Brien feels guilty for all the soldiers who have died and all

the innocent Vietnamese. Military men of the Vietnam era did not only feel guilty for dead

soldiers, but also for going or not going to Vietnam. Whatever their decision was, going to

war or not, people felt guilty: ―Viet Nam left the nation with a massive and interlocking sense

of bad conscience. Says Pollster Daniel Yankelovich: ―Those who didn‘t serve have a bad

conscience. Those who did and those who supported the war and then changed their minds

have a bad conscience. And the way we treated the soldiers who served there gives us all a

bad conscience‖‖ (Morrow 23). In Tim O‘Brien‘s novel the narrator‘s greatest guilt is that of

going to war in the first place. He has the feeling that he could have prevented some of the

atrocities by refusing to go to Vietnam. He calls himself a coward for going to the war. In the

30

book he tells the story of his attempt to flee to Canada. He is ashamed to tell the story and

therefore he informs the reader why he has never told this story before.

Even now, I‘ll admit, the story makes me squirm. For more than twenty years I‘ve had to live with it,

feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down

on paper, I‘m hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams. Still, it‘s a hard story to tell.

(TTTC 39)

He explains how he never saw a purpose in the war. He knew it was morally wrong.

In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated.

I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naïve, but even so the American war in Vietnam

seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no

consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. (TTTC 39-40)

O‘Brien says that you cannot start a war without knowing why. He is very confused and feels

that he should be able to choose whether he wants to go to war or not. But that is not the only

reason he does not want to go to war. He is terrified. He says: ―I did not want to die. Not ever.

But certainly not then, not there, not in a wrong war‖ (TTTC 42). He is morally confused

because he does not want to go, while the people around him support the war. He is afraid he

will be an outsider and will have to go into exile to Canada to escape the war. The people

from his village, he says, do not understand the war and the history of Vietnam. They support

the war, because ―it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple‖ (TTTC 44). He

cannot stand the ignorance of the villagers and the fact that they will never understand if he

refuses to go to the war. He decides to flee to Canada. ―I headed straight west along the Rainy

River, which separates Minnesota from Canada, and which for me separated one life from

another‖ (TTTC 45). He stays at a lodge with an old man, who does not ask questions,

although O‘Brien presumes that the man knows why he is there. Having plenty of time to

think, O‘Brien stays for a few days and eventually decides to go back home and to go to the

war. ―I was ashamed to be there at the Tip Top Lodge. I was ashamed of my conscience,

ashamed to be doing the right thing‖ (TTTC 48). In a sort of hallucination he sees his family

31

and the people from the village across the river. They yell at him and call him back. He gives

in and goes back home.

The risk of post-traumatic stress disorder is higher with combat soldiers. Here the soldier is

not only ―a passive witness‖, but also a participant in violent death or atrocity. The trauma of

combat soldiers is even bigger when the soldier does not see violent death justified in a higher

value or meaning. The Vietnam War is a good example of this. Soldiers saw that victory

could not be possible. In The Ten Thousand Day War Michael Maclear describes the

pointlessness of the war:

Vietnam is unique as the first television war, and for the passions and opposition which the living-room

images aroused. Quite simply, the cameras revealed nothing of purpose. A war longer than all previous

major wars of the century combined, bloodier than any in terms of the small arena involved, is all the

more haunting for its apparent lack of meaning, a war for which the answers are still sought in the field

of psychiatry because there were none on the field of battle. […] The world‘s most advanced nation

became a social casualty of the first television war in which, relatively, only the commercials made

sense. (Maclear xiii-xiv)

This view on the pointlessness of the Vietnam War is shared by Herman in Trauma and

Recovery who explains that it was ―not merely the exposure to death but rather the

participation in meaningless acts of malicious destruction that rendered men most vulnerable

to lasting psychological damage‖ (Herman 54), and this view is also confirmed by Tim

O‘Brien‘s stories. In one of them he reflects on the killing of a Vietcong soldier who the

narrator supposedly killed (TTTC 179), but then he denies killing him. He explains how he

still is guilty for being present. He saw the soldier being killed and his participation in the war

was guilt enough. O‘Brien also explains (TTTC 131) how meaningless the soldier‘s death

was, because the soldier would have passed by without noticing O‘Brien‘s platoon. The

narrator says that this will be something that he will have to live with. He says: ―There was no

real peril. Almost certainly the young man would have passed by. And it will always be that

32

way‖ (TTTC 131). According to a study of Vietnam veterans, quoted by Herman (54), about

20 percent of them admitted to having witnessed atrocities in Vietnam. Another 9 percent

acknowledged personally committing atrocities. Those who had witnessed or participated in

abusive violence, had the most symptoms of trauma. Another study of Vietnam veterans

found that the men who acknowledged participating in atrocities had post-traumatic stress

disorder more than a decade after the end of the war (Herman 54).

Because of traumatic events the sense of connection between individual and community is

broken. This causes a ―crisis of faith‖ (Herman 55): the survivor starts to distrust community.

This crisis of faith is more severe when important relationships are betrayed by traumatic

events, e.g. when a person feels let down by people who should help or support him (Herman

55-56). This has a great impact on the behaviour of the survivor: it causes rage towards his or

her relatives. On the other hand the survivor feels compassion for people who might be

harmed. It also has an effect on the relationships of the traumatized survivor who at the same

time desperately seeks and withdraws from relationships. The withdrawal happens because

the survivor wants to avoid situations that remind him or her of the trauma. At the same time

the terror of the trauma makes the need for protective relationships even bigger. ―It results in

the formation of intense, unstable relationships that fluctuate between extremes‖ (Herman 56).

In O‘Brien‘s novel Norman Bowker has the need to tell his story to everyone who wants to

hear it. At some point in the book, the narrator is describing how Bowker is driving around in

his car and stops at a drive-in of a hamburger restaurant. He orders his food, and when he has

finished he wants to tell his story to the voice in the intercom.

He finished his root beer and pushed the intercom button. ‗Order,‘ said the tinny voice. ‗All done.‘

‗That‘s it?‘ ‗I guess so.‘ ‗Hey, loosen up, ‗ the voice said. ‗What you really need, friend?‘ Norman

Bowker smiled. ‗Well,‘ he said, ‗how‘d you like to hear about –‘ He stopped and shook his head. ‗Hear

33

what, man?‘ ‗Nothing.‘ ‗Well, hey,‘ the intercom said, ‗I‘m sure as fuck not going anywhere. Screwed

to a post, for God sake. Go ahead, try me.‘ ‗Nothing.‘ ‗You sure?‘ ‗Positive. All done.‘ The intercom

made a light sound of disappointment. ‗Your choice, I guess. Over an‘ out.‘ ‗Out,‘ said Norman

Bowker. (TTTC 150)

Norman Bowker wants to make his story known to other people, and the voice in the intercom

seems prepared to listen. The whole situation is awkward and above all sad, because Bowker

does not see any point in telling, because nobody could ever understand it. The same happens

when Bowker imagines that he has a conversation with his father, in which he explains how

he was a coward when Kiowa was dying. Timmerman sees the father as the imaginary

―confessor figure‖ (Timmerman 105). Bowker imagines that his father wants to make his son

feel better and says that maybe Kiowa was already dead. In an imaginary conversation the

father argues that Bowker was still brave, because he has different medals. For Bowker,

however, this does not mean anything. He still did not save Kiowa. He can imagine a

confession in his mind, but even then he cannot imagine his father saying the right things. In

reality his father would be the right person to talk to, because he also went to war, but he shut

himself off and ―adopted the routine manners of the present by no longer listening‖

(Timmerman 108). So the only way for Bowker to confess his guilt is in his imagination. The

verbal construction ‗would have‘ in the following quotation shows that the whole

conversation is made up.

‗The truth,‘ Norman Bowker would‘ve said, ‗is I let the guy go.‘ ‗Maybe he was already gone.‘ ‗He

wasn‘t.‘ ‗But maybe.‘ ‗No, I could feel it. He wasn‘t. Some things you can feel.‘ His father would have

been quiet for a while, watching the headlights against the narrow tar road. ‗Well, anyway,‘ the old man

would‘ve said, ‗there‘s still the seven medals.‘ ‗I suppose.‘ ‗Seven honeys.‘ ‗Right.‘ (TTTC 151)

Entangled in guilt for supposed responsibility, the survivor desperately needs the support

from society and family in the process of recovery. People in the social environment of the

survivor have the possibility of influencing the outcome of trauma: support can decrease the

34

impact of the event, hostile reaction can make it worse. The sense of self that the victim has

lost can only be regained in relationship with others. Shortly after the traumatic event the

most important thing is to rebuild a minimal form of trust. The victim soldier needs

reassurance of the fact that he will never be abandoned again (Herman 61-62), like during the

war he sought safety in the small combat group. War trauma increases when a soldier is

separated from his unit (Herman 62). Therefore the ex-soldiers of Vietnam founded veteran

groups after the war. In The Things They Carried the soldiers do not seek support in a veteran

group. Such groups are not even mentioned in the story. The characters of the book do not

seem to fall back on a social network and that is their drama (as in the case of Bowker). The

safety of the small combat group, however, is mentioned in the novel. In Worlds of Hurt Kalí

Tal mentions the brotherhood of the combat group. There is an intense bond between soldiers

in combat which is ―a way of coping, of creating a safe place in a hostile world, turning to

each other for understanding and support (Tal, Worlds of Hurt 142). This bond also has a

negative side to it, because it can cause atrocities. Often soldiers redeem a death of a soldier

by an act of atrocity (Tal, Speaking the Language of Pain 215). When the narrator-protagonist

O‘Brien gets hurt, he has to leave his platoon to recover. When he sees the platoon members

back, he does not belong to them anymore and this hurts him a lot.

Jorgenson – he‘s with us now.‘ ‗And I‘m not?‘ Sanders looked at me for a moment. ‗No,‘ he said. ‗I

guess you‘re not.‘ Stiffly, like a stranger, Sanders moved across the hootch and lay down with a

magazine and pretended to read. I felt something shift inside me. It was anger, partly, but it was also a

sense of pure and total loss: I didn‘t fit anymore. They were soldiers, I wasn‘t. In a few days they‘d

saddle up and head back into the bush, and I‘d stand up on the helipad to watch them march away, and

then after they were gone I‘d spend the day loading resupply choppers until it was time to catch a movie

or play cards or drink myself to sleep. A funny thing, but I felt betrayed. (TTTC 197)

He feels isolated and abandoned by his companions, and the worst thing for him is that his

enemy, the medic Bobby Jorgenson, is now part of his group. The medic, who did not react

35

quickly when O‘Brien got shot, has taken the protagonist‘s place in the platoon. O‘Brien

wants to make him pay.

When a soldier is back home there are no problems of safety and protection. When this sense

of safety has returned, the people around him have to help rebuild the victim‘s sense of self.

―The restoration of a sense of personal worth requires the same kind of respect for autonomy

that fostered the original development of self-esteem in the first years of life‖ (Herman 63).

Many soldiers who have returned from the war have problems with intimacy and aggression.

Josefina Card has found that ―men with post-traumatic stress disorder were less likely to

marry, more likely to have marital and parental problems, and more likely to divorce than

those who escaped without the disorder. Many become extremely isolated or resorted to

violence against others‖ (qtd. in Herman 63). Combat veterans who do not have the support

from their family have a higher risk of persistent post-traumatic symptoms. The character of

Norman Bowker exemplifies the lack of social support. His father is not even prepared to

listen, therefore Bowker invents conversations with his father. He has no support from his

family and the invented conversations cannot help him. He has no support from other

veterans, and that is exactly what he needs. The only person he contacts from his platoon is

Tim O‘Brien, but only in a letter. He isolates himself completely from the outside world. The

character of O‘Brien also does not belong to a veteran group, but he gets his social support

from his readers. The narrator tells his stories through his books, and this helps his healing

process, although he does not exactly know if his readers understand his stories. He also starts

to share his stories with his daughter, Kathleen, but she is too young to understand what her

father has been through.

36

It is also important that the people nearest to the survivor confront him or her with his or her

behaviour. Not willing accept the violent or angry behaviour of the victim, they have to show

that such behaviour is not tolerable. If they do not confront him or her, the survivor will feel

free to express extreme anger and he or she may withdraw from social life. The attitudes of

the people closest to the victim are very important, their judgements have to be realistic, that

is to say ―a recognition of the dire circumstances of the traumatic event and the normal range

of victim reactions‖ (Herman 66). ―They include the acceptance of moral dilemmas in the

face of severely limited choice. And they include the recognition of psychological harm and

the acceptance of a prolonged recovery process‘ (Herman 66). This issue of judgement is very

important for the recovery of the connection between the war veteran and those closest to

him. In O‘Brien‘s novel we only find ignorance and incomprehension from the environment.

In the case of Bowker the family simply does not react. In O‘Brien‘s case his daughter

expresses her negation by asking for other stories. There is no re-integration process in the

stories of O‘Brien. The narrator is integrated into the large community by writing stories, but

he is not integrated in the small community of family and friends.

Society often looks at veterans as outsiders. If there is social support, it is mostly limited to

the circle of combat veterans. The war story has kept ―men of a particular era, disconnected

from broader society that includes two sexes and many generations‖ (Herman 67). The

separation of veterans from society perpetuates the fixation on the trauma. The trauma

becomes a moment frozen in time (Herman 67).

37

Chapter 4: Recovery and Testimony

Trauma survivors have to learn to assess their conduct reasonably, therefore they have to find

a balance between unrealistic guilt and denial of all moral responsibility. As mentioned in the

former chapter the victim‘s environment plays a crucial part in his or her process of recovery,

especially in his or her development moral balance.

In coming to terms with issues of guilt, the survivor needs the help of others who are willing to

recognize that a traumatic event has occurred, to suspend their preconceived judgements, and simply to

bear witness to her tale. When others can listen without ascribing blame, the survivor can accept her

own failure to live up to ideal standards at the moment of extremity. Ultimately she can come to a

realistic judgement of her conduct and a fair attribution of responsibility. (Herman 68)

Resolving survivor‘s guilt is not easy. Herbert Hendin and Ann Haas made a study of combat

veterans and found that a simple absolution of the guilt is not enough. We have to understand

the particular reasons for self-blame in order to resolve the guilt (Herman 68).

Finally the survivor has to mourn for the losses and needs help from others to do this. If the

survivor does not mourn, the trauma will perpetuate the traumatic reaction. According to

Robert J. Lifton, ―unresolved or incomplete mourning results in stasis and entrapment in the

traumatic process‖ (qtd. in Herman 69). The problem with the mourning of trauma survivors

is that there are no customs or rituals that support the victim through the mourning process.

Without this support the ―potential for pathological grief and severe, persistent depression is

extremely high‖ (Herman 70).

The survivor does not only seek support from those closest to him, but also from the

community, then the survivor will be helped if there is ―public acknowledgement of the

traumatic event‖ and ―some form of community action‖ (Herman 70). These two responses –

38

recognition and restitution –are necessary to rebuild the survivor‘s sense of order and justice.

Soldiers who return home seek obvious support of the community. ―After every war, soldiers

have expressed resentment at the general lack of public awareness, interest, and attention;

they fear their sacrifices will be quickly forgotten‖ (Herman 70). Often there are public

memorial ceremonies to honour and remember the veterans, but for them these ceremonies

are never satisfactory, because the truth of combat is distorted. It becomes a sentimental

heroism. Tim O‘Brien describes this feeling. Often war stories make you feel better. The

narrator wants to avoid this. He wants people to be shocked by his stories, see the reality of

war, and not feel uplifted: ―If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that

some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made

the victim of a very old and terrible lie‖ (TTTC 68).

Soldiers want to know what the public thinks of their actions. Are their actions seen as

―heroic or dishonourable, brave or cowardly, necessary and purposeful or meaningless‖

(Herman 71)? If the veterans are rejected, they will not be able to reintegrate in the

community easily, and they will become isolated. The Vietnam War is a typical example of

this. There was great public opposition against the war in Vietnam and the protest increased

as the casualties mounted. Robert J. Lifton explains how Vietnam veterans became isolated

after the war.

Attempts to contain the antiwar sentiment led to policy decisions that isolated soldiers both from

civilians and from one another. Soldiers were dispatched to Vietnam and returned to their homes as

individuals, with no opportunity for organized farewells, for bonding within their units, or for public

ceremonies of return. Caught in a political conflict that should have been resolved before their lives

were placed at risk, returning soldiers often felt traumatized a second time when they encountered

public criticism and rejection of the war they had fought and lost. (Herman 71)

39

The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. is an important public contribution to the

healing of the trauma of veterans. This memorial is a ―site of common mourning‖ (Herman

71).

The recovery of a trauma survivor entails regaining power and restoring connections with

those close to him or her. The ―psychological faculties‖ (Herman , 33) that were damaged are

recreated. ―These faculties include the basic capacities for trust, autonomy, initiative,

competence, identity, and intimacy‖(Herman 133). The first thing the survivor has to do is to

regain power. The victim needs support to do this (Herman 133).

Abram Kardiner defines the role of the therapist as that of an assistant to the patient, whose goal is to

―help the patient complete the job that he is trying to do spontaneously‖ and to reinstate ―the element of

renewed control.‖ (Herman 134)

Herman describes the therapeutic relationship as unique, because the only goal in this

relationship is the recovery of the patient. Herman calls the therapist ―the patient‘s ally‖

(Herman 134). The patient and therapist also have a contract. Because the therapist has more

power in this relationship, he or she has to promise to use this power only to foster the

recovery of the patient. The therapeutic relationship also has to strive to be disinterested and

neutral.

‖Disinterested‖ means that the therapist abstains from using her power over the patient to gratify her

personal needs. ―Neutral‖ means that the therapist does not take sides in the patient‘s inner conflicts or

try to direct the patient‘s life decisions. (Herman 135)

This neutrality being a technical neutrality, does not imply that the therapist is supposed to be

morally neutral, as the therapist has to take a moral stance. He or she must feel solidarity for

the victim, has to acknowledge that injustice has been done against the victim, but cannot see

the patient as a person who cannot do anything wrong (Herman 135).

40

In The Things They Carried there is no obvious therapeutic relationship. The narrator nor any

other character in the book visits a therapist (at least the reader is not informed). The

description of a therapy could have destroyed the magic of the novel, therefore it is of no

importance in the story to know if the characters visit a therapist or not. By the omission of a

therapeutic relationship in his novel O‘Brien opens a therapeutic relationship between the

reader and the narrator. The reader is an empathic listener. However, there is an important

characteristic of the therapeutic relationship that can be found in the story of Tim O‘Brien.

This characteristic is what Herman calls traumatic transference (Herman 136): i.e. that the

emotional responses of the traumatized person to any person in a position of authority have

been deformed by the experience of terror, what leads to transference reactions with an

intense, life-or-death quality unparalleled in ordinary therapeutic experience. Traumatic

transference reflects the experience of terror and the experience of helplessness. When trauma

occurs the victim is completely helpless:

Unable to defend herself, she cries for help, but no one comes to her aid. She feels totally abandoned.

The memory of this experience pervades all subsequent relationships. The greater the patient‘s

emotional conviction of helplessness and abandonment, the more desperately she feels the need for an

omnipotent rescuer. Often she casts the therapist in this role. She may develop intensely idealized

expectations of the therapist. The idealization of the therapist protects the patient, in fantasy, against

reliving the terror of trauma. (Herman 137)

The therapist naturally cannot fulfil this need for perfection and this often causes anger with

the patient. For the patient the therapist has to be perfect, because he or she depends on this

person for his or her security. Herman uses a passage from The Things They Carried to

illustrate the traumatized rage against the rescuer (Herman 137). In the case of Tim O‘Brien it

is not the therapist who is expected to be omnipotent, but the medic. I have already discussed

the story of Bobby Jorgenson. Jorgenson had to help O‘Brien when he was shot, but he froze

and did not react as he should have. O‘Brien reacts furiously to this situation.

41

Granted, I didn‘t hate him anymore, and I‘d lost some of the outrage and passion, but the need for

revenge kept eating at me. At night I sometimes drank too much. I‘d remember getting shot and yelling

out for a medic and then waiting and waiting and waiting, passing out once, then waking up and

screaming some more, and how the screaming seemed to make new pain, the awful stink of myself, the

sweat and the fear, Bobby Jorgenson‘s fingers when he finally got around to working on me. I kept

going over it all, every detail. I remembered the soft, fluid heat of my own blood. Shock, I thought, and

I tried to tell him that, but my tongue wouldn‘t make the connection. I wanted to yell, ‗You jerk, it‘s

shock – I‘m dying!‘ but all I could do was whinny and squeal. I remembered that, and the hospital, and

the nurses. I remembered the rage. But I couldn‘t feel it anymore. In the end, all I felt was that coldness

down inside my chest. Number one: the guy had almost killed me. Number two: there had to be

consequences. (TTTC 199)

Herman (138) explains O‘Brien‘s reaction to the situation as a reaction of helpless rage and

the displacement of rage from perpetrator to caregiver. Instead of blaming the enemy for

almost killing him, he blames the medic. The feeling of humiliation and shame increase his

rage, because he is mortified that the medic sees him in this vulnerable situation, even though

he desperately needs the rescuer. In the hospital, while he is recovering from his wounds, he is

planning a revenge on the medic, but not against the enemy. ―Many traumatized people feel

similar rage at the caregivers who try to help them and harbor similar fantasies of revenge. In

these fantasies they wish to reduce the disappointing, envied therapist to the same unbearable

condition of terror, helplessness, and shame that they themselves have suffered‖ (Herman

138). O‘Brien wants to prove that Jorgenson is not a good medic and that he will also paralyse

in new terrifying situation. When he eventually tests Jorgenson, he sees that the medic has

learned a lot and that he does not freeze in a traumatizing situation anymore. He also realizes

that his revenge is useless, it will not help him and he is ashamed that he tried to take revenge.

(TTTC 211-12).

42

The patient is not capable of trusting the therapist, because the trust has been damaged

through the trauma. The patient is convinced, in the beginning of the therapeutic relationship,

that the therapist cannot help him and that he also cannot bear the awful truth of the trauma.

The patient also questions the motives of the therapist. The victim ―suspects the therapist of

exploitative or voyeuristic intentions‖ (Herman 138).

Herman distinguishes three stages of recovery in the healing of the traumatized person: the

first stage is the establishment of safety, the second stage is remembrance and mourning, the

third stage is reconnection with ordinary life. These stages of recovery may not to be taken

too literally, they are a convenient fiction (Herman 155). Herman describes the different

stages for different kinds of trauma. For combat trauma the first stage is trust, stress

management and education. The second stage is the reexperiencing of trauma. In the last stage

there has to be integration of the trauma. In The Things They Carried these stages are not

literally distinguishable. The reader does not really know if the characters regain trust and

safety.

Before constructing the story of trauma, the patient has to tell the story of his or her life before

the trauma. This helps to establish a continuity in the patient‘s past. Here a context is

established in which the trauma can be understood (Herman 176). In the next step the

traumatic event is told in different facts. The therapist forms these fragments into an account

―oriented in time and historical context‖ (Herman 177). The story is not only about the

traumatic event itself, but also about the reactions of the people around the survivor. It

becomes more difficult for the patient when he or she has to focus on the details of the

traumatic events (Herman 177).

A narrative that does not include the traumatic imagery and bodily sensations is barren and incomplete.

The ultimate goal, however, is to put the story, including the imagery, into words. The patient‘s first

43

attempts to develop a narrative language may be partially dissociated. She may write down her story in

an altered state of consciousness and then disavow it. She may throw it away, hide it, or forget she has

written it. Or she may give it to the therapist, with a request that it be read outside the therapy session.

(Herman 177)

An account of the trauma has to include the survivor‘s emotions. The aim is that the patient

should relive the feelings he or she had during the traumatic event, but from a safe

environment in the present. The patient has to hold on to this sense of safety, which he or she

did not have during the traumatic event. The patient also has to look at the meaning of the

traumatic event for him- or herself and for others. It is important that the patient articulates the

values he or she had before the traumatic events. And the survivor also has to think about

what should be done (Herman 178). Thought alone cannot resolve the trauma. The patient and

the therapist have to be aware that there is always insecurity about certain facts of the story.

Some things will always stay uncertain (Herman 179).

The narrator in The Things They Carried also integrates elements of his life before the war

into his story: his first date and the events shortly before he went to the war. He talks about

his principles and beliefs before the war. We already looked at the passage in which the

narrator expresses his objections to the war, but he briefly mentions that he went to college.

Although the account of his life before the war is not detailed, it situates his trauma in his

whole life story. The story of his trauma is not chronologically ordered, it is up to the reader

to place all the different events in chronological order. The problem for the reader in

understanding the story is that the different stories are not always placed in a certain time and

the reader has to solve the puzzle by reading the stories more than once. Also the fact that the

stories are told several times from different angles makes it difficult for the reader to make a

coherent story. The truth of the stories is often questioned in the book, so sometimes the

reader does not know what happened and what did not happen, fact and fiction are entangled.

44

We will explain this in another chapter. Herman says that the trauma story has to include the

emotions of the survivor, what is true for O‘Brien, who often makes known what he felt on

certain occasions, but this does not happen all the time.

Survivors are apprehensive when it comes to reconstructing the story. ―Denial of reality

makes them feel crazy, but acceptance of the full reality seems beyond what any human being

can bear‖ (Herman 181). The important goal of telling the story is not to erase the traumatic

event. The telling has to become a testimony that will not be forgotten.

Sometimes a patient does not want to give up certain symptoms of the trauma, e.g. flashbacks,

because they can be ―a symbolic means of keeping faith with a lost person, a substitute for

mourning, or an expression of unresolved guilt‖ (Herman 184). The most difficult part of the

reconstruction is the integration of horrors into a life narrative. (Herman 184)

This slow, painstaking, often frustrating process resembles putting together a difficult picture puzzle.

First the outlines are assembled, and then each new piece of information has to be examined from many

different angles to see how it fits into the whole. […] The reward for patience is the occasional

breakthrough moment when a number of pieces suddenly fall into place and a new part of the picture

becomes clear. (Herman 184)

Things that happen in the present can trigger events of the past. Flashbacks and nightmares

are clues of the past the patient has to explore (Herman 185). There are several techniques to

access memories of the past, which alter the state of consciousness of the patient: e.g.

hypnosis, ―social methods, such as intensive group therapy or psychodrama‖, ―biological

methods, such as the use of sodium amytal‖ (Herman 186).

We already learned that mourning of traumatic loss is important for the recovery of the

survivor. The survivor often resists the process of mourning, because they have the feeling

45

that once mourning has started, it will never stop. They can feel too proud, because mourning

feels as a defeat for the survivor and a victory for the perpetrator. The patient has to see the

mourning as a courageous instead of humiliating development (Herman 188). Resistance to

mourning often leads to stagnation in the second stage of recovery: ―Resistance to mourning

can take on numerous disguises. Most frequently it appears as a fantasy of magical resolution

through revenge, forgiveness, or compensation‖ (Herman 189).

The patient has to take responsibility for his or her own recovery because it is the only way of

getting control of the recovery. Responsibility has an even bigger meaning for those survivors

who have committed atrocities themselves, as in the case of combat veterans (Herman 192).

Although the survivor may come to understand that these violations of relationship were committed

under extreme circumstances, this understanding by itself does fully resolve the profound feelings of

guilt and shame. The survivor needs to mourn for the loss of her moral integrity and to find her own

way to atone for what cannot be undone. This restitution in no way exonerates the perpetrator of the

crimes; rather, it reaffirms the survivor‘s claim to moral choice in the present. (Herman 192-93)

When the patient often repeats his story, it becomes less intense. The telling of the story is not

that painful anymore. The traumatic event has become like any other memory and becomes

vague after a certain time. This memory does not seem the most important event in the life of

the survivor anymore. The survivor will be apprehensive at first, because it seems wrong not

to remember the trauma that intensely. But after a certain time the trauma will not take a

central place in the life of the survivor anymore, still remembering it every day, but not in the

demanding way as before. Although reconstruction of the trauma will never be complete, the

trauma will belong to the past, which will enable the survivor to move on with his or her life

and start thinking about the future (Herman 195).

46

The third stage of recovery is that of reconnection. When the survivor has mourned for the

past, it is time to make a future. He or she has to find new beliefs, because the old ones were

challenged by the trauma. The survivor has to find out what his or her ambitions are,

rediscover the old ones or find new ones. ―Helplessness and isolation are the core experiences

of psychological trauma. Empowerment and reconnection are the core experiences of

recovery. In the third stage of recovery, the traumatized person recognizes that she has been a

victim and understands the effects of her victimization‖ (Herman 197).

Survivors try to master their fears and in this way getting a grip on the trauma (Herman 197-

98). ―By choosing to ―taste fear‖ in these self-defense exercises, survivors put themselves in a

position to reconstruct the normal physiological responses to danger, to rebuild the ―action

system‖ that was shattered and fragmented by the trauma. As a result they face their world

more confidently‖ (Herman 198). In the third stage of recovery the survivor may choose to

confront family and friends with his story. The survivor may only make this confrontation

when he or she is ready for it. He or she cannot have any need for confirmation or have fear

for the consequences (Herman 200). The survivor is not possessed by the traumatic past

anymore. He or she tries to create a new self from events after the trauma and before the

trauma (Herman 202). In The Things They Carried the narrator is still obsessed with the past,

feeling the urge to write stories about the war. As a reader you have the feeling that he has not

yet integrated his traumatic experience into his life.

In the third stage of recovery, the victim has regained trust in other people. He learns to trust

others again. He or she tries to assess in which situations people can be trusted. The

distinction between the two situations is very important. When the trauma is part of the past,

the traumatized person will not feel any barriers in intimate relationships. The intimacy with

47

others will increase. When the intimacy increases, the victim feels connected with the next

generation (Herman 205-06).

Concern for the next generation is always linked to the question of prevention. The survivor‘s

overriding fear is a repetition of the trauma; her goal is to prevent repetition at all costs. ―Never again!‖

is the survivor‘s universal cry. In earlier stages of recovery the survivor often avoids the unbearable

thought of repetition by shunning involvement with children. Or if the survivor is a parent, she may

oscillate between withdrawal and overprotectiveness with her children, just as she oscillates between

extremes in her other relationships. (Herman 206)

Only in the third stage of recovery, when the trauma is fully integrated, can the survivor pass

on his or her legacy to children. The survivor wants to protect the next generation from future

dangers and show how to draw lessons from his story (Herman 207). O‘Brien tells his story to

his daughter. He wants to pass it on to the next generation. She is too young to understand the

purpose of his storytelling. The storytelling does not have a great impact on his daughter yet,

but this may come in time.

Survivors can seek a survivor mission. O‘Brien‘s mission is to tell his story to the world, tell

the truth and warn the next generation. Kalí Tal explains that veterans used their personal

experiences to condemn politics by testifying to atrocities they witnessed. They were trying to

―retell the past‖, ―to inscribe into the picture of reality characters and events and resolutions

that were previously invisible, untold, unspoken (Tal, Worlds of Hurt 143).

Most survivors seek the resolution of their traumatic experience within the confines of their personal

life. But a significant minority, as a result of the trauma, feel called upon to engage in a wider world.

These survivors recognize a political or religious dimension in their misfortune and discover that they

can transform the meaning of their personal tragedy by making it the basis for social action. While there

is no way to compensate for an atrocity, there is a way to transcend it, by making it a gift to others. The

trauma is redeemed only when it becomes the source of a survivor mission. (Herman 207)

48

It is important to know that the trauma is never over and that the recovery is never complete.

―Issues that were sufficiently resolved at one stage of recovery may be reawakened as the

survivor reaches new milestones in her development‖ (Herman 211). Psychologist Mary

Harvey has defined seven criteria for the resolution of trauma.

―First, the physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been brought within

manageable limits. Second, the person is able to bear the feelings associated with traumatic memories.

Third, the person has authority over her memories: she can elect both to remember the trauma and to put

memory aside. Fourth, the memory of the traumatic event is a coherent narrative, linked with feeling.

Fifth, the person‘s damaged self-esteem has been restored. Sixth, the person‘s important relationships

have been reestablished. Seventh and finally, the person has reconstructed a coherent system of

meaning and belief that encompasses the story of the trauma.‖ (in Herman 212)

Groups are very important for people who have been in extreme situations, e.g. war.

Belonging to a society, having a public role, being part of that which is universal restores the

social bonds and shows the victim that he or she is not alone. (Herman 215) Taking part in the

customary, the commonplace, the ordinary and the everyday brings a sense that one‘s own

troubles are ―as a drop of rain in the sea‖ (Herman 235-36).

An important distinction that has to be made in traumatic experience, is the different levels of

witnessing. Laub makes a distinction between three levels of witnessing (Felman and Laub

75-79). The witness can be present and experience the event at first hand. The second form of

witnessing is secondary witnessing. The secondary witness listens to the story of a

traumatized person. The third form of witnessing is witnessing the process of witnessing. This

kind of witness is present when a survivor tells his story to a listener. The testifying of the

survivor is very important, as we have already established. The survivor tells his or her tale in

order to survive. And the event that the survivor experienced also has to survive. The

traumatic events cannot be forgotten. The three levels of witnessing that Dori Laub

49

distinguishes are present in The Things They Carried. The narrator is a witness at different

levels. He is first of all a direct witness of atrocities, although he does not describe many

things he saw himself. He witnessed fights, and atrocities and he was shot twice (see above).

But a lot of the horrific stories in the novel, are things that he did not witness himself, but

which other soldiers told him about. As a secondary witness he listens to the experiences of

the other soldiers. By doing so he helps the other soldiers recover from their traumas, he is an

empathic listener. Sometimes the narrator creates false memories. He sometimes talks about

things that he experienced, but afterwards he says that he did not. The reader can never know

for sure when the narrator experienced events himself or when he is a secondary witness,

because he never sees the events from an objective point of view. All the events are told from

the point of view of the narrator. The reader does not know the exact facts of the events that

are described in the stories. Another secondary witness in The Things They Carried is the

narrator‘s daughter Kathleen. Although she is very young, only ten years of age, she is a

witness of O‘Brien‘s stories. In the conversations with his daughter he does not tell the

horrific stories, because she is too young (TTTC 184-85). O‘Brien wants his daughter to

know what he has been through, for he wants to pass on his past to his daughter. Here the

importance of passing on the story is stressed. Kathleen stands for the next generation that has

to prevent such events from happening again. The burden of the protagonist is the fact that he

is alive while others are not and that he has to spread the message of war trauma.

A FEW MONTHS AFTER completing ―In the Field,‘ I returned with my daughter to Vietnam, where

we visited the site of Kiowa‘s death, and where I looked for signs of forgiveness or personal grace or

whatever the land might offer. (TTTC 183)

Kathleen had just turned ten, and this trip was a kind of birthday present, showing her the world,

offering a small piece of her father‘s history. (TTTC 184)

50

The reader is also a secondary witness to the stories that the narrator tells. But the reader also

witnesses the process of witnessing. He listens to the stories that soldiers tell to O‘Brien. He

also listens to the conversations between the narrator and his daughter. As a listener the reader

has an important role, i.e. a therapeutic function. According to Dori Laub the listener has a

very important role in the process of testimony. Before the narrative of a trauma is listened to

by a secondary witness, the testimony does not yet exist. The testimony has not really

occurred without the listener.

The victim‘s narrative—the very process of bearing witness to massive trauma—does indeed begin with

someone who testifies to an absence, to an event that has not yet come into existence, in spite of the

overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of its occurrence. While historical evidence to the

event which constitutes the trauma may be abundant and documents in vast supply, the trauma—as a

known event and not simply as an overwhelming shock—has not been truly witnessed yet, not been

taken cognizance of. The emergence of the narrative which is being listened to—and heard—is,

therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognisance, the ―knowing‖ of the event is given birth

to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo. The testimony of to the

trauma thus includes the hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be

inscribed for the first time. By extension, the listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a co-owner

of the traumatic event, through his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself.

(Felman and Laub 57)

Laub also makes a distinction between three kinds of witnesses (Felman and Laub 80-83). He

uses the example of the Holocaust to illustrate the three kinds of witnesses. The different

witnesses are the perpetrators, the bystanders and the victims. Laub immediately states that

the Holocaust is ―an event without a witness‖ (Felman and Laub 80). It is impossible to be a

completely trustworthy witness to a traumatic event. The perpetrators will not give testimony,

because they want to forget the whole experience. They try to destroy the evidence. At the

end of the Second World War the nazis destroyed documents of the Holocaust in order not to

51

leave any evidence. The bystanders were not actively involved in the horrible events, but they

cannot give an accurate testimony either. They did not see everything that happened, and they

are often ashamed that they did not do anything, even though they often knew what was going

on. The victims find it hard to testify. They do not register every detail about their experience

and they cannot give a historically accurate testimony. ―We, the survivors, are not the true

witnesses‖ (qtd in Tager) says Primo Levi: the victims with the most accurate and most full

experience of trauma are those who are dead.

In The Things They Carried there is also a distinction between the different witnesses, but in

the Vietnam War the distinction is less radical than in the Holocaust. The soldiers in the

Vietnam War, and in every other war, are offenders, victims and bystanders. The Vietnam

veterans are not the innocent victims that the Jewish victims were in the Holocaust.

―Soldiers, though subordinate to their military superiors and frequently at the mercy of their enemies,

still possess a life-or-death power over other people. […] Much recent literature – popular, clinical, and

academic – places the soldier simply in the victim‘s role; helpless in the face of war, and then helpless

to readjust from the war experience upon his return home. Feminist critics should be quick to voice their

disapproval of an interpretation so drastically at odds with reality. The soldier in combat is both victim

and victimizer; dealing pain as well as receiving and experiencing it. Soldiers carry guns; they point

them at people and shoot to kill. (Tal, Worlds of Hurt 138)

Veterans realise that they are both victims and perpetrators. This notion complicates their

trauma. Soldiers have killed people and they have to carry this guilt. They realise they are not

totally innocent. The narrator of The Things They Carried does not try to hide this. He

confronts the idea of being an offender. He does not try to paint a picture of the soldier as

simply a victim.

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Chapter 5: Creating Confusion

The narrator of The Things They Carried wants to tell a war story but also and especially a

story of trauma, but what is striking is that he wants to avoid closure of his story. So he

creates uncertain stories interspersed with lies, uncertainties and doubt. In this way the reader

can never exactly know what happened in a certain story and the stories stay open for

interpretation and be told over and over again. From the beginning the narrator and the author

create confusion about the truthfulness of the novel. The author Tim O‘Brien begins his book

with a dedication to the (fictional) characters of his novel: ―This book is lovingly dedicated to

the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley,

Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins and Kiowa.‖ For Catherine Calloway, author of ―‗How to

Tell a True War Story‘: Metafiction in The Things They Carried.‖, that means that the author

wants the fictional characters of the novel to seem real, so that it makes the reader wonder if

the characters of the stories are real or imaginary. To enhance the confusion of the reader an

affirmation of the fictionality of the book is printed two pages further than the dedication:

―This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author‘s own life, all the

incidents, names and characters are imaginary.‖ By writing this O‘Brien revokes the

dedication: a book is not normally dedicated to people who do not exist. The reader is already

confused, even before reading the novel. There are of course more reasons for writing a

dedication to fictional characters. The confusion can have a simple explanation: that the

author has based the characters of his book on soldiers he knew and that he will not reveal

their identity. Therefore he could have written down fictional names instead of the names of

the real soldiers he has based his stories on. The author could also have used these names

because he wants to dedicate his story to all soldiers who fought during the war. In that sense

the characters of the novel stand for all traumatized soldiers.

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The author of The Things They Carried foregrounds the credibility and truthfulness of the

stories. His strategy for establishing this believability is to represent the narrator as believable

and trustworthy. The narrator needs to have a great authority, if the reader is to believe his

stories. The narrator in The Things They Carried has different roles that increase his

believability. Mats Tegmark describes the different roles the narrator has in The Things They

Carried in his book In the Shoes of a Soldier: Communication in O’Brien’s Vietnam

Narratives (206-20). These roles are that of the storyteller, narrator as character, narrator as

writer and narrator as literary theorist. The narrator is an obvious storyteller in most of the

stories because he identifies himself as such, but in three stories he remains anonymous. This

role of storyteller is the most conventional role of the narrator. A subperspective is created in

the novel because the narrator takes on the role of narrator-character. The story becomes even

more complex because the narrator is not only a character in the stories but also the author of

the chapters he is narrating, as he claims in the stories ―Spin‖ and in ―Notes.‖ The narrator‘s

authority is again increased when he is identified as a Vietnam veteran. He has been a

personal witness of the war, which makes the narrator a believable source. He is also

identified as a famous author, but the fact that he is a personal witness is more important than

his authority as a famous author. The narrator-character in the story is relating all his troubled

memories of the war; he writes out of an obsession with the past what is clear to the reader

from the beginning. The narrator claims that he has written other books such as If I Die in a

Combat Zone and Going After Cacciato. Here the impression is given that the book is

autobiographical, but this is not completely true. By referring to other published works of the

real Tim O‘Brien the text becomes intertextual. He oversteps the borderline between ―the

world of the story […] and that of the discourse,‖ but he also breaks ―the boundary separating

the textual from the extratextual‖ (Tegmark 213). The fourth role of the narrator in The

Things They Carried is that of literary theorist. The narrator comments on the art of

54

storytelling. As a character he points to the personal meaning of stories, how he cannot forget

his war experiences and has to keep on writing, but as a literary theorist he shows the

interpersonal meaning of stories: they can make things come alive for people. The narrator

analyses how stories have to be told in order to communicate a message to the next

generations. The reader has to acknowledge the different roles of the narrator in order to fully

understand the different stories. Although the narrator is given a great authority, he is flawed

in his role as storyteller. The reliability of the narrator as storyteller is questioned, because we

only see the stories from his point of view. The narrator tries to hide this by quoting the

narrators from the other stories. The reader will not immediately see that it is the narrator who

is telling this, which again increases the believability, but here the believability is a lie. We

have no facts that can be compared to his stories, so we will never know if he is telling the

truth. Can this storyteller be trusted? The reader has to answer this for him- or herself. The

flaws of the narrator become apparent, because he emphasizes the truthfulness and authority

of the narrator.

As I already mentioned above the narrator is identified as a famous writer. That is because the

narrator is called Tim O‘Brien and the name of the writer is the same. The reader cannot

know, without any research, if the narrator-protagonist is the same person as the writer, or if

they are different individuals, but the reader is interested in the extent to which the novel is

autobiographical. The use of a real name creates an illusion of authenticity, what means that

the reader will automatically believe that there is a link between the fiction of the novel‘s

adventures and the reality of the writer‘s life. Actually, there are some parallels between the

narrator and the writer, as is acknowledged in the epigraph of The Things They Carried,

without the book being entirely autobiographical. Catherine Calloway also makes this point in

her article ―‗How to Tell a True War Story‘: Metafiction in The Things They Carried‖. She

55

gives some indications of the differences between the real Tim O‘Brien and the fictional

character:

Also ambiguous is the issue of how much of the book is autobiography. The relationship between

fiction and reality arises early in the text when the reader learns the first of many parallels that emerge

as the book progresses: that the protagonist and narrator, like the real author of The Things They

Carried, is named Tim O‘Brien. Both the real and the fictional Tim O‘Brien are in their forties and are

natives of Minnesota, writers who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Macalester College, served as grants

in Vietnam after having been drafted at age twenty-one, attended graduate school at Harvard University,

and wrote books entitled If I died in a Combat Zone and Going After Cacciato. Other events of the

protagonist‘s life are apparently invention. Unlike the real Tim O‘Brien, the protagonist has a nine-year-

old daughter named Kathleen and makes a return journey to Vietnam years after the war is over.

(Calloway N. pag.)

There are obvious parallels between author and protagonist, but there is also a big difference.

Vietnam veteran-writer O‘Brien and narrator-protagonist O‘Brien both studied at the same

college, went to Vietnam, are writers etc. But, for instance, he has not yet returned to Vietnam

at the time of writing the book, which later he will do, as described in the essay The Vietnam

in Me. The book is not completely autobiographical, although the writer puts some elements

of his life into the story to make it seem more real. Certainly different elements of the story,

e.g. the description of the effects of trauma, are things that the author has been through. One

can say not only that he relied on personal experience to write his stories, but also that he

would probably not have written war stories if he had not been drafted in the Vietnam War.

In an interview Tim O‘Brien admits that there are certain things that are based on real

experiences. In the story ―Speaking of Courage‖ the narrator receives a letter from a soldier

he knew in Vietnam. He asks the narrator to write a story about him and how he feels. The

author O‘Brien received a letter from someone he knew asking him to write a story. He did

write it, and asked this person what he thought of it. He turned out to like the story, contrary

56

to Norman Bowker who disliked the story the narrator wrote (Kaplan N. pag.). The book is

partly based on personal experiences, but these experiences are revised and used to write

stories. The reader cannot interpret all the stories as truthful and autobiographical, because

they are never exactly the same as the reality. Another story in the book, the one about Curt

Lemon‘s death, is based on a real experience. The story will be discussed in more detail later

in the following chapter, but now we will briefly look at the facts the story was based upon.

Heberle tells the origin of the story. It is based on the death of a friend of the author, called

Chip Merricks. Merricks died because he stepped on a mine. The real event is supplemented

by a fiction. In A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam Heberle calls the

fiction ―more ‗true‘ than what actually happened‖ and he adds to it that the fiction nonetheless

―remains without closure‖ (195). Heberle also adds that Tim O‘Brien cannot get over the

trauma of what happened to Chip Merricks or Curt Lemon, whether as narrator or as author

(195-96). To understand the novel better we have to know a little more about the life of Tim

O‘Brien. We have to understand the perspective from which the stories of The Things They

Carried have been written.

In the following passage I will give some important facts of Tim O‘Brien‘s life (Smith 1-9).

Tim O‘Brien is the son of William T. and Ava E. (Schultz) O‘Brien. Both his parents were

active in the Second World War, his father in the Pacific theatre and his mother as a WAVE

(Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service, a division of the American Navy). Tim

O‘Brien went to Vietnam, due to ―the pressures of life in small-town America‖ (Smith 1).

Before his tour of duty in Vietnam, he lived in Minnesota. He was born October 1, 1946, in

Austin, Minnesota, where his family lived before moving to Worthington in the same state.

O‘Brien is not positive about Worthington. He remembers it as boring and its population as

stupid: ―The people in that town [who] sent me to war … couldn‘t spell the word ‗Hanoi‘ if

57

you spotted them three vowels‖ (Smith 2). The place where O‘Brien grew up affects his

development and this became a common theme in his books. O‘Brien does not speak a lot of

his childhood, but he often uses autobiographical elements ―as the basis for many of his

characters‘ fears and ambitions‖ (Smith 4). With his enormous passion for literature, his

desire to be a writer arose when he discovered some old clippings that his father wrote about

his experiences during World War II, which were published in The New York Times. His

literary vocation awoke with the war of his father and was realised with his own war: ―The

early promise of a life of books would come true, in a way, when O‘Brien, like his father,

published personal accounts of his own war – Vietnam – in various Minnesota papers‖ (Smith

3). A distinctive characteristic of O‘Brien‘s literature is described as ―the intertwining of

memory and imagination, as well as the author‘s obsessive attention to language and

meaning-making‖ (Smith 3). His experiences of the Vietnam war are well documented. They

are mentioned in his memoir or in his novels and stories, combined with fictional elements.

O‘Brien was drafted a month after he graduated from Macalester College. He did not want to

be a fighting soldier, because he thought that the war was unjustified and his parents knew

this. The story ―On the Rainy River,‖ in which the protagonist considers going to Canada in

order to escape his duty in Vietnam, is based on a real experience of O‘Brien. Tim O‘Brien

considered desertion to Canada, but actually he did not run away. He wanted to run, but he

could not. When he talks about the story, he says that he fabricated the flight to Canada to

show how he felt inside:

―He leans in over the microphone, like he‘s confessing, though the look on his face made it seem more

like he was the priest and we were the sinners, and he tells us everything he just said was fiction—all

true, he says, but fiction nonetheless. Most people familiar with O‘Brien‘s works have heard this from

him before‖ (Dayley 317). Regardless of its genesis, the story is indicative of O‘Brien‘s state of mind at

the time and explains, at least in part, his later reputation as a stylist who, perhaps more than any other

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writer focusing on Vietnam, combines reality and fiction with little regard for the story‘s surface

relation to the ―truth‖. (Smith 5)

In Vietnam O‘Brien was made an infantryman in the U.S. Army‘s Fifth Battalion, 46th

Infantry, better known as the Americal Division. He expected to be assigned as clerk or cook,

so it must have been a shock for him to be made an infantryman. A defining moment in his

Vietnam experience was their assignment on the ground of the My Lai area. The year before,

on 16 March 1968, there had been a massacre in this area: the burning down of the village My

Lai and the killing of the villagers by the American platoon of Lieutenant W.L. Calley

(Maclear 373-78). O‘Brien and his unit did not know that this had happened. Tim O‘Brien

returned from the war in 1970. He had earned a Purple Heart for a shrapnel wound. At home

he wanted to give up writing. He enrolled in Harvard‘s Kennedy School for graduate work in

political science, but he did not finish his studies. He started to work for the Washington Post

as a national-affairs reporter for a short time until he became a full-time writer. His first book,

If I Die in a Combat Zone, was published in 1973. The same year he married a magazine

production manager. His second and third books were Northern Lights and Going After

Cacciato. For Going After Cacciato he won the National Book Award. In 1990 he published

The Things They Carried and in 1994 he published his sixth book, In the Lake of the Woods.

He considered giving up writing, but later that year he published his essay The Vietnam in Me,

in which he describes his return to Vietnam. In 1998 he published the novel Tomcat in Love

and in 2002 July, July. These novels are ―less obsessed with the direct influence of Vietnam

on the character‘s lives three decades after the fact (although, to be sure, the protagonists of

both novels are keenly aware of the sacrifices they made all those years before), focusing

instead on the characters‘ lives in the interim‖ (Smith 7). Since 1999 O‘Brien has been Mitte

Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos. For the rest O‘Brien‘s

personal life has remained well hidden. We only know that O‘Brien is divorced and

remarried. We know that he is a father, because in 2004 he published a letter to his 16-month-

59

old son about the advantages and disadvantages of fatherhood. Vietnam is a very important

theme for O‘Brien he explains: ―All writers revisit terrain. Shakespeare did it with kings, and

Conrad did with the ocean, and Faulkner did with the South. It‘s an emotional and

geographical terrain that‘s given us by life. Vietnam is there the way childhood is for me‖

(Smith 9).

The biography shows that the war and the trauma of war is a reason for the author Tim

O‘Brien to write stories. There is something that makes him write stories over and over again.

His work The Vietnam in Me is the only explicitly autobiographical work by O‘Brien. In that

essay he describes his return to Vietnam, admitting, for the first time, that he is traumatized by

the war. Before he had never admitted that the war had a traumatizing effect on him, leading

his readers to believe that he came out of the war unharmed. The return to Vietnam was very

unsettling for O‘Brien. His visits to former battlefields in Quang Ngai, where he served in

1969, reawakened terrible memories:

[…] the terror of combat, the deaths of former comrades, homicidal fear and dread directed at the

Vietnamese themselves, the destruction of their villages, small brutalities and large atrocities

perpetrated by American soldiers. […] O‘Brien‘s self-revelation shocked many of his readers because,

unlike many combat veterans, he had seemed to be relatively unaffected psychologically by his

experiences in Viet Nam. In a 1990 interview, he confessed that ―for the rest of my life I‘ll probably be

writing war stories‖ but ―not out of any obsession with the war,‖ and claimed that he had experienced

no postwar adjustment problems (Coffey). But here O‘Brien was presenting himself as a deeply

troubled figure who had suffered for more than two decades from bad dreams that had been reawakened

to the point of self-destruction by the return to Viet Nam. Nor is the near-breakdown simply a result of

the war. The loss of the woman he loves also seems to be a life-threatening experience. (Heberle 3)

O‘Brien went through the same traumatic symptoms as his characters. Even though we do not

know which symptoms the author had, we do know that he is writing his stories out of his

own experiences. But in The Things They Carried the protagonist claims that he has come out

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of the war unharmed. The protagonist is lying as he does not want to admit that he has typical

symptoms of trauma. The reader who knows this, will be more aware of the fact that the

protagonist in The Things They Carried could be lying about other things too, when he can lie

about this. The confession of the trauma by the protagonist could have been too

confrontational for the author O‘Brien. Around the time he wrote this novel, we read in the

quotation that O‘Brien claimed to have no symptoms of trauma. He was not ready to admit

his trauma, not even in his fictional character. For the reader it may not be necessary to know

the biography of Tim O‘Brien in order to read the novel, but his biography puts things into

perspective. The reader can place the stories in the life of the writer, and the biography shows

that the author is a trauma survivor and not a non-survivor and that this has an important

influence on his writing. The biography shows that the reader cannot assume that because the

protagonist has the same name as the author that he is the same person. In The Things They

Carried, for instance, the protagonist sees beauty in the war, but the author O‘Brien says that

he never did:

I never felt or thought that war‘s pretty, even though I can see how people like such as Bill Broyles have

said that. My personal feeling is that it‘s pretty ugly. I was in danger, and my perception never let me

see any beauty. All I felt was fear. What I‘m saying is that even with that nonfiction-sounding element

in the story, everything in the story is fiction, beginning to end. To try to classify different elements of

the story as fact or fiction seems to me artificial. Literature should be looked at, not for its literal truths

but for its emotional qualities. (Naparsteck 9)

Reading O‘Brien‘s work against the background of his personal biography brings out the

fictional nature of his stories and puts more emphasis on the message of the stories than on

the question of their truthfulness. O‘Brien often talks about the authenticity of the stories. He

emphasizes that it does not matter if his stories are fictional, as this does not make them less

true or authentic. He explains in an interview with Martin Naparsteck that the story ―How to

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Tell a True War Story‖ in The Things They Carried is a combination of essay and fiction. He

gives definitions of the war story, followed by examples which give the impression of a

mixture of essay and fiction, but the distinction between the two in the text is not that

obvious. The style is essay-like and the content is fictional, but for O‘Brien the unity of form

prevails. It is neither fiction nor essay, it is the two together.

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Chapter 6: Telling a True War Story

That in The Things They Carried a whole story is dedicated to the art of writing a true war

story has a deeper historical meaning. The Vietnam War, as we have already discussed, was

different from other wars, and therefore writers had to find a new way of telling the war story,

they had to go ―beyond the limits of conventional literary stereotypes‖ (Timmerman 110). In

―How to Tell a True War Story‖ the narrator gives instructions on how to tell the truth in a

war story and how to write a good war story. Heberle defines this section of the novel as a

―complex meditation on war literature in general‖, but also as a ―brilliant representation of

trauma writing‖ (Heberle 187). The validity of fiction is questioned in this story as well as its

relationship to trauma. The narrator sums up different qualities of the true war story. He

claims that a true war story cannot be moral, for it is not written to guide people‘s lives, not

created to show them how to live. If a war story gives you instructions, it is not a good story.

Timmerman, in the magazine Twentieth Century Literature, explains that a writer may not

give moral lessons to the reader (112). The narrator has to make the experiences

understandable for the readers, so that the readers can derive their own moral lessons. It is

possible and desirable to derive moral lessons from a war story, but the moral differs from

reader to reader. The narrator cannot show what moral lessons to draw from the story:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper

human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral,

do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of

rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and

terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you

can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. (TTTC

68)

The lack of a moral lesson in the novel of O‘Brien and his desire to leave out the moral in a

true war story, is typical of postmodernism. In postmodernism the emphasis is on the reader

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and not on the author. The reader has to draw lessons from reading literature. The author does

not tell one truth that the reader has to follow. In postmodernist literature the author is made

visible, because they write themselves into their story, as in the case of The Things They

Carried. But the author is fictionalised: he is a character, not the real author. McHale

describes that in postmodernism ―the self-advertisement‖ of the author is ―conversely a form

of self-effacement‖ (199). As a consequence we found in postmodernist literature ―The Death

of the Author‖ (McHale 199). There are some other postmodernist concepts that can be found

in O‘Brien‘s novel. But we cannot put O‘Brien entirely in postmodernist literature, because he

wants to get a certain message across. ―Although it is true that O‘Brien is not interested in the

aesthetics of his work solely for its formal qualities, his rejection of postmodernism does not

bar his work from inclusion in the postmodern‖ (Kaufmann 334). The concept of flux is very

important in postmodernist literature. The only certainty is the flux, the idea that the language

and the text itself are constantly moving and changing. The Things They Carried is a text

constantly changing and showing that that is the only way to write good war literature. The

idea of deconstruction can also be found in The Things They Carried. In deconstruction the

ideas expressed in a novel are placed ―under erasure‖ (McHale 100). Certain ideas are

revoked and the contrary of the former concept is put forward. There is never a final and

definitive truth in deconstruction: ―It emerges that literary texts, born of language, partake of

a both/and nature, both preserving and undoing meaning at once‖ (Atkins 4). It is important to

note that, just like in O‘Brien‘s novel, one meaning or truth is never substituted by another.

The two meanings are both valid at the same time. The last important characteristic of

postmodernism is that literature is not mimetic. It does not imitate reality in its content. The

aim is to show the complexity of reality, in The Things They Carried the complexity of

traumatic experience, in the form and not in content (McHale 38). The Things They Carried

shows the complexity of a traumatic experience and the reaction to it in the style of the novel,

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i.e. the fragmentation of the stories, repetition, etc. However Tim O‘Brien is different from

postmodernism because the content of the novel also reflects on trauma. Postmodernist

literature does not want to represent reality, and moreover literature is not able to show the

world as it is, experiences as they were. O‘Brien argues this, a war story cannot show what

actually happened. The narrator argues that the distinction between what happened and what

seemed to happen is not clear. What seemed to happen becomes real, and the storyteller has to

make the seeming be real. ―The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then

afterward, when you go tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes

the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed‖

(TTTC 70). A true war story is also true although and because it cannot be believed. If you

can believe a war story, the narrator argues, it probably did not happen, because ―the crazy

stuff is true and the normal stuff isn‘t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you

believe the truly incredible craziness‖ (TTTC 70). There are stories that you cannot tell,

because they are ―beyond telling‖ (TTTC 70). Another important characteristic that the

narrator attributes to a war story is the feeling of infinity of a story. The story does not seem

to end. The narrator does not oppose the idea of a moral in a war story, but this moral, if there

is one, cannot be extracted from the story. You cannot point at the moral of a true war story

and say: ‗That is what it is all about‘. ―In a true war story, if there‘s a moral at all, it‘s like the

thread that makes the cloth. You can‘t tease it out. You can‘t extract the meaning without

unravelling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there is nothing much to say about a

true war story, except maybe ‗Oh‘‖ (TTTC 75). A true war story cannot generalize. The

purpose of such a story is to make you feel what happened. ―A true war story, if truly told,

makes the stomach believe‖ (TTTC 75). A war story cannot generalize, because there are

more truths in war and the truths are contradictory. The narrator says: ―To generalize about

war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true‖

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(TTTC 77). The narrator argues that there is no point in a true war story, or maybe there is,

but you realize it only years after reading it. The important thing about a true war story is that

when you ask yourself the question ‗Is it true?‘, you know that the answer does not matter. If

the truth, the facts of a story, are important, it is not a true war story, ―because a true war

story, does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may

happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth‖ (TTTC

79). A true war story is a story that you keep on telling. You change it, add certain elements,

leave some things out. It is a story that is not fixed, it has the possibility of endless change. At

a certain moment in ―How to Tell a True War Story‖ the narrator tells the story of the baby

buffalo. Rat Kiley wants to avenge the death of Curt Lemon. When he sees a baby water

buffalo he shoots the animal. He does not want to kill it, but he wants to torture it. He shoots

the animal in different parts of his body and it dies very slowly. Afterwards Kiley cries, not

for torturing the buffalo, but because his best friend has died. The killing of the baby buffalo

is very horrific, and the narrator says that sometimes when he has told this story someone will

come up to him and give their reaction to this story:

Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me afterward and say she liked it. It‘s

always a woman. Mostly it‘s an older woman of kindly temperament and humane politics. She‘ll

explain that as a rule she hates war stories, she can‘t understand why people want to wallow in all the

blood and gore. But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad. Sometimes, even, there

are little tears. What I should do, she‘ll say, is put it all behind me. Find new stories to tell. I won‘t say it

but I‘ll think it. I‘ll picture Rat Kiley‘s face, his grief, and I‘ll think, you dumb cooze. Because she

wasn‘t listening. It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story. But you can‘t say that. All you can do is tell

it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth. No

Mitchell Sanders, you tell her. No Lemon, no Rat Kiley. No trail junction. No baby buffalo. No vines or

moss or white blossoms. Beginning to end, you tell her, it‘s all made up. Every goddamn detail – the

mountains and the river and especially that poor dumb baby buffalo. None of it happened. None of it.

And even if it did happen, it didn‘t happen in the mountains, it happened in this little village on the

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Batangan Peninsula, and it was raining like crazy, and one night a guy named Stink Harris woke up

screaming with a leech on his tongue. You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it. (TTTC

80)

Mark Heberle argues that the narrator uses the reaction of the woman to illustrate two kinds of

misreadings of O‘Brien‘s fiction in which there is a relationship between traumatization and

war stories. The first misreading is to interpret the story as an actual experience instead of the

―fabulation of something that may or may not have happened‖ (Heberle 189). The narrator

wants to show that a true story has multiple versions. In the passage quoted above he refers

implicitly to another novel, Going After Cacciato, whose narrator says that if the story

happened it will be found in the book. The narrator of The Things They Carried shows that

the truth of the versions does not depend on what happened, ―but on the different ways in

which killing a water buffalo is rewritten as a powerfully traumatic experience in Cacciato,

The Nuclear Age, and Things‖ (Heberle 189). In ―How to Tell a True War Story‖ the narrator

introduces the story as being literally true, and he makes his reader believe this. The woman

who reacts in the passage above is moved by the story, but she assumes that the narrator must

be traumatized because it all seemed so real and detailed. Her reaction to the story is

ambiguous: she is moved by his story, but nonetheless she advises the narrator to write about

something else (Heberle 189-90). The second misreading is missing the point of the story.

The narrator is upset by the assumption that the subject of the story is war. The listener has

misattributed traumatization to the storyteller, and she cannot identify the real source of

trauma and its victim. The listener has not identified the subject, which the narrator identifies

in the quotation above as being love, not war.

The story describes the love Rat Kiley felt for his friend Curt Lemon. The only reaction he

can give is to express his anger towards the enemy by torturing the only trace of the enemy,

the baby buffalo. Obviously violence is not going to solve the trauma, ―but destruction seems

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the only means at hand for these violence-tempered young men‖ (Heberle 192). Robert J.

Lifton explains why soldiers commit atrocities. According to Lifton atrocities can only be

understood in a world defined by war. Atrocity can be seen as a way to ―define their world in

a coherent manner‖ (qtd. in Tal, Speaking the Language of Pain 239), as ―a perverse quest for

meaning‖ (qtd. in Tal, Speaking the Language 239). O‘Brien tries to give a love story ―from

the elemental filth of the war, one that avoids sentimentality or a happy ending‖ (Heberle

192): ―And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It‘s about sunlight. It‘s

about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the

river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It‘s about love and

memory. It‘s about sorrow. It‘s about sisters who never write back and people who never

listen‖ (TTTC 80). Heberle explains that in this passage the narrator denies the mimetic and

thematic limitations normally found in war literature (192). The narrator wants to show the

real subject of his stories. A true war story talks about human experiences: how we experience

love, death, etc. And above all it is about the need to communicate your experiences to others

(Tegmark 218). The narrator wants to show the truth of the war, but this truth cannot be

mistaken for the facts of the war. The stories are presented in different forms: as fact, as

fiction and as a possibility (Kaplan N. pag.). Timmerman also recognizes that stories cannot

represent the facts of war. The purpose of war stories is not to give data, but to ―evoke the

dreams and lives of individual soldiers‖ (Timmerman 101). O‘Brien plays with the dialectic

between ―reality as data and reality of the human spirit‖ (Timmerman 101). The narrators and

characters in his stories take part in this dialectic. This genre of telling is not an easy path,

because it raises certain questions about the possibility of capturing reality in fiction. Can

fiction create a greater sense of reality than a factual account? The reader has to understand

what happened, why and how it affected the soldier. Is it possible for a writer to keep his

memory authentic, free from ―romantic idealism and bitter cynicism‖ (Timmerman 101)?

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According to Steven Kaplan, the reader is forced to simultaneously see the unreal, the stories,

as real (as is written in the dedication) and the names and the events as unreal (as found in the

affirmation of the novel‘s fictionality). O‘Brien often claims to get at the truth, the full truth

about the war. According to Kaplan, it is impossible for O‘Brien to show the truth, because

the narrator warns the reader that truth is always ambiguous, that you cannot expect stories to

be entirely correct, and that they do not need to be completely true. Kaplan does not see the

possibility of getting at the truth, as facts, if there is no such unambiguous thing as the truth

(N. pag.). Kaplan says that O‘Brien constantly emphasizes the ambiguity of his stories by

revisiting the different stories and changing them. To illustrate this revision of stories I will

give an example, namely the story of the death of Curt Lemon. The narrator often refers to the

death of Curt Lemon, but four times he gives a description of this story. The story seems to

intrude into other stories, which according to Mark Heberle shows that this experience is an

ineffaceable trauma (193). The death of Curt Lemon is described in ―Spin‖, ―How to Tell a

True War Story‖, ―The Dentist‖, and ―Lives of the Dead‖. In ―Spin‖ we learn that Curt

Lemon has died, but we do not know how until we read ―How to Tell a True War Story‖. In

this story the narrator slowly unravels what happened to Curt Lemon. The reader has to piece

together all the different parts of the story. Catherine Calloway explains how the description

of Lemon‘s death evolves (Calloway N. pag.). At first the death is not described in a graphic

way; slowly the description becomes more and more graphic towards the end of the section.

In the beginning the narrator describes how Lemon looked: ―A handsome kid, really. Sharp

grey eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the

sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and

vines and white blossoms‖ (TTTC 69). The horror of the death is completely left out; it is

described poetically. There even seems to be something positive in this description, but this

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will change later. Lemon is not mentioned for a few pages, until the narrator describes how

Rat Kiley avenges the death of Lemon by mutilating and killing a baby water buffalo. Later

the story is told for the third time, and here the narrator tells how they had to peel Lemon‘s

body parts from a tree. Later in the novel Curt Lemon is brought back alive when in the

section ―The Lives of the Dead‖ Kiley describes how Lemon went trick-or-treating in

Vietnam. The narrator comments on this and describes how this story affects him. For the

narrator Lemon is alive when Kiley tells this story. He says: ―You‘d never know that Curt

Lemon was dead‖ (TTTC 232). The story is not told chronologically. The narrator first

mentions that Lemon is dead, and the last time he mentions Curt Lemon he brings him back to

life. In the end the narrator wants to remember his friends as living and not as dead. He keeps

them and their memory alive. The truth of every individual story is always ambiguous and

even when the narrator claims that he will give the exact truth of an event, it is only for a very

short time. The truths of every story do not last long.

You can look at the truth that O‘Brien tries to show in a different way. It is true that the

narrator claims that there is no possibility of telling the whole truth of a certain experience.

What he means by this is that when you tell a story, you cannot remember everything exactly

as it happened. There are always certain facts that are left out or changed, and the perspective

of the one who tells a story is also a hindrance for getting at the exact truth, because every

person experiences an event in a different way. But here the narrator talks about truth as the

facts. When the narrator claims to show the whole truth, he does not mean the exact facts of a

certain story, because these do not matter to him. The truth here is something different,

transcending the simple facts of a story. Truth is more about the meaning behind the stories,

i.e. the universal truths about war. He wants to show the real horror of the war, what it is

really like, with all the ambiguities. O‘Brien wants to get a certain message across to his

readers, to the next generation, and warn people about the consequences of war. This cannot

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be reduced to facts. The narrator cannot pronounce this in a single story or text. He has to

show it through ambiguous, changing stories. Kaplan also recognizes that there is a more

important truth than the truth from the stories. Therefore Kaplan begins his explanation by

telling why events are put into fiction (N. pag.). He claims that in fiction we can look at

events in a detached world. You have taken the events out of reality and look at them in a

staged world. The task for the reader is to participate in this detached world, to really believe

in it. The reader will understand and feel the stories better when he or she participates in the

detached world. The ambiguity of the stories shows the shock effect the war had on the

soldiers. Just as the reader does not know what is true and what is false in O‘Brien‘s stories,

so the soldiers did not know what was real and what was not in the war. Their values became

vague. They did not know anymore what was right and wrong. For the soldier and for the

reader this ambiguity is unsettling. For the soldier this is also traumatic, because everything

he believed in seemed to be no longer valuable. The reader, of course, does not experience

trauma. The reader believes in this fictional world, but does not have to face the consequences

of the events in the real world. For him or her what he or she reads about is still not the real

world, but the enacted world. However, the reader has the possibility of experiencing a part,

even if it is just a fraction, of what soldiers went through during the Vietnam War. Kaplan

describes this experience of ambiguity:

Now since the latter (the text) is fictional, it automatically invokes a convention-governed contract

between author and reader indicating that the textual world is to be viewed not as reality but as if it were

reality. And so whatever is repeated in the text is not meant to denote the world, but merely a world

enacted. This may well repeat an identifiable reality, but it contains one all-important difference: what

happens within it is relieved of the consequences inherent in the real world referred to. Hence in

disclosing itself, fictionality signalizes that everything is only to be taken as if it were what it seems to

be, to be taken--in other words--as play. (Kaplan N. pag.)

Catherine Calloway sees the similarity between a true war story and the Vietnam war itself.

The rules for a true war story are also applicable to the Vietnam War: ―True war stories, the

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reader soon realizes, are like the nature of the Vietnam War itself; ‗the only certainty is

overwhelming ambiguity‘ (88). ‗The final and definitive truth‘ (83) cannot be derived, and

any ‗truths are contradictory‘ (87)‖ (Calloway N. pag.). As mentioned above the narrator in

The Things They Carried constantly revises his stories. By telling the same events from a new

angle or with new or changed elements, he keeps the story open for interpretation, although

the essence of his stories remains the same. Daniel Robinson, in the magazine Critique,

speaks of the ―essential, underlying truth of each story‖ (N. pag.) that lies in the stories

themselves as well as in the technique of narrativisation that O‘Brien uses. Maria S. Bonn

indicates that ―the dizzying interplay of truth and fiction in this novel is not solely aesthetic

postmodern gamesmanship but a form that is a thematic continuation of the author‘s concern

throughout his career with the power and capability of the story‖ (qtd. in Timmerman 111).

Representation in The Things They Carried is not a mimetic act but a game, a way of acting

things out:

In The Things They Carried, representation includes staging what might have happened in Vietnam

while simultaneously questioning the accuracy and credibility of the narrative act itself. The reader is

thus made fully aware of being made a participant in a game, in a ―performative act,‖ and thereby also

is asked to become immediately involved in the incredibly frustrating act of trying to make sense of

events that resist understanding. (Kaplan N. pag.)

The soldier‘s view of reality during the war has changed radically, because the ethical frame

of reference is shattered. The distinction between good and evil has become blurred. Not only

has the ethical view been shattered, but also the reality itself is unknowable. Good and evil,

fact and fiction are entangled and inextricable. For the soldier the events of the war appear to

happen in another dimension. The reader has the same experience when reading the novel. He

or she cannot be sure what happened and what did not happen in the war, and is unable to

pass judgement on the actions of the characters of the stories. When something cruel occurs,

e.g. the story of the water buffalo, the reader cannot judge whether the actions of the soldiers

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are justified. An act of cruelty is often a reaction to the loss of a soldier, so the reader can

sometimes see a justification for the actions of the soldiers. The reader is not shocked

anymore by the cruelty of the soldiers, because he or she is not certain that cruelty is

unjustified and if it really happened in the first place.

The stories are uncertain because the form and content of the stories are changed, but also

because the witnesses are not certain what happened. The narrator of The Things They

Carried also is never certain about what really happened. He and the other soldiers do not

know what they experienced:

Conveying the average soldier's sense of uncertainty about what actually happened in Vietnam by

presenting the what-ifs and maybes as if they were facts, and then calling these facts back into question

again, can be seen as a variation of the haunting phrase used so often by American soldiers to convey

their own uncertainty about what happened in Vietnam: ―there it is.‖ They used it to make the

unspeakable and indescribable and the uncertain real and present for a fleeting moment. (Kaplan N.

pag.)

The reader does not always know if the uncertainty is created consciously or unconsciously.

The theme of uncertainty is a common theme in war literature. For the author Tim O‘Brien

fiction is the best way to express this uncertainty and confusion of his traumatic experiences.

You have to explore the uncertainties in order to come close to something certain. It seems the

only way to find anything certain. (Kaplan N. pag.) In an interview with Martin Naparsteck

O‘Brien explains what good literature is in his opinion. He compares literature with

describing courage. He does not want to give a definition of courage, but he wants to look at

all the possible meanings of the word. O‘Brien explains that literature always is explorative.

In literature you search for answers, but you never find them. He says that if you knew the

answers, e.g. if you knew what courage was, you would not write literature, you would write

philosophy:

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Fiction is a way of testing possibilities and testing hypotheses, and not defining, and so I think that more

than anything the work is a way of me saying, yes, courage is clearly important in this character‘s life;

he thinks about its importance in circumstances; the work is a way of searching for courage, finding out

what it is. (Naparsteck 5)

According to Steven Kaplan O‘Brien takes the understanding of uncertainties of the war one

step further in The Things They Carried. O‘Brien not only blurs the line between fact and

fiction, but he also wants to show that fiction can be more true than fact. The narrator tries to

understand the uncertainties through imagination (Kaplan N. pag.). In the interview with

Martin Naparsteck, O‘Brien explains that you can get at the truth through imagination. He

claims that an experience with a great impact on one‘s personality changes over time.

According to O‘Brien the mind changes the story so that it becomes something that has

meaning and something you can deal with. It becomes something more valuable and

permanent. In O‘Brien‘s view, the experience that you created in your mind has a certain

power that the actual experience does not have:

I think in war we tend to block out the long, hard moments of boredom, standing around, waiting, which

is a lot of what war is. It‘s ninety-nine percent monotony, and what the imagination does is push that

away and take what‘s left and reorder it into patterns that give meaning to it. (qtd. in Naparsteck 10)

This gives an explanation of how the narrator in the section ―How to Tell a True War Story‖

comes to a different understanding of what happened than in the beginning. In this story he

describes the death of Curt Lemon, how Lemon stepped on a landmine and how they had to

take his body parts from a tree. By imagining this horrible scene he sees the real truth. Before

he did not see the horror of the death. It was too hard for him to remember (Naparsteck 10).

―How to Tell a True War Story‖ is a metafictional story, in which the writer reflects on how

to write. This section attracts attention to itself. It shows the methods the writer and narrator

use in the other stories (Calloway N. pag.). It also explains how to understand the different

stories of the novel. In the article ――How to Tell a True War Story‖: Metafiction in The Things

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They Carried‖ Catherine Calloway argues that The Things They Carried is as much about the

process of writing as it is a literary text itself (N. pag.). The form of the novel becomes the

content, the medium is the message, according to Calloway (N. pag.). The narrator draws

attention to himself as an author and in this way to the work itself, showing that the work is

the product of a conscious process of writing, a fictional work. ―How to Tell a True War

Story‖ is not the only metafictional story in the book. The story ―Notes‖ reflects on the

preceding story ―Speaking of Courage,‖ which we discussed in the first chapter. In ―Notes‖

the reader learns how ―Speaking of Courage‖ came about and why the narrator decided to

write the story. The story about Norman Bowker is in reality a revision of an earlier story that

was published in the Massachusetts Review in 1976, and it was used later in Going After

Cacciato. In Going After Cacciato the protagonist is not Norman Bowker as in ―Speaking of

Courage‖, but Paul Berlin, who could not save Frenchie Tucker, who died while searching a

tunnel (Calloway N. pag.). As we saw in chapter 2 in ―Notes‖ the narrator is asked by Bowker

to write a story about his past and his present misery. The importance of the story is that it

gives metafictional information on the previous one. The reader is made conscious of the

process of writing and the revision of the story. Again, ―Speaking of Courage‖ has no definite

truth and the narrator gives no indication of which version of the story is the exact one. The

reader is involved in the creation of the stories and he or she is forced to see the fictionality of

the novel.

Catherine Calloway points to other characters besides the protagonist who admit the

fictionality of their stories. Calloway gives an example from ―How to Tell a True War Story‖.

Mitchell Sanders tells the story of a patrol who go on ―a basic listening-post operation‖

(TTTC 70). They go into the mountains and have to report every suspicious thing they hear.

They just stay and listen, and at a certain moment, Sanders says, they hear weird music

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coming from the mountains. Later on they also start to hear voices, and then the arias of an

opera and the music of a glee club. The soldiers cannot handle this, and they start to fire into

the mountains and blow away trees. But they still hear the voices. So they go back to their

base camp and their colonel wants to know what happened there, but they cannot say it.

Certain stories cannot be told, and they know their colonel would not understand it. Sanders

explains the next day to O‘Brien what the moral of his story is: ―‗The moral, I mean. Nobody

listens. Nobody hears nothin‘. Like that fatass colonel. The politicians, all the civilian types.

Your girlfriend. My girlfriend. Everybody‘s sweet little virgin girlfriend. What they need is to

go out on LP. The vapors, man. Tree and rocks – you got to listen to your enemy.‘‖(TTTC 74)

The next day Sanders admits to O‘Brien that parts of the story are completely invented: ―‗Last

night, man, I had to make up a few things.‘ ‗I know that.‘ ‗The glee club. There wasn't any

glee club.‘ ‗Right.‘ ‗No opera.‘ ‗Forget it, I understand.‘ ‗Yeah, but listen, it's still true. Those

six guys, they heard wicked sound out there. They heard sound you just plain won‘t

believe‘‖(TTTC 74). Heberle argues that Sanders‘ attempt to give the story a moral to

separate fact from fiction is completely unnecessary, as the narrator explains in ―How to Tell

a True War Story‖. Sander‘s story is an example of how a story, fiction, can be truer than the

facts. Heberle also points to the fact that a story can make ―the survivor‘s trauma meaningful,

but only to the right audience‖ (188). In this fragment we also see that what a narrator

communicates is always the experience of a certain event: ―It does not matter what you

perceive; if you believe you have seen or heard something, the experience as such is true‖

(Tegmark 217). It does not matter in this instance whether it happened the way Sanders tells

it; what matters is that it felt like that to the soldiers. Often trauma survivors have memories

that do not coincide with historical facts. Dori Laub gives an example of such a historically

inaccurate testimony. A woman who had survived Auschwitz talked about how she witnessed

the explosion of four chimneys in the concentration camp. Her testimony was criticised by

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historians, because the number of chimneys that exploded was wrong. There was only one

chimney that was blown up, so her testimony was regarded as false. But one of the people that

had interviewed the woman, a psychoanalyst, explained how her testimony and memory were

valuable even though factually inaccurate (Felman and Laub 59-60):

The woman was testifying, […] not to the number of the chimneys blown up, but to something else,

more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. One chimney blown up in

Auschwitz was as incredible as four. The number mattered less than the fact of the occurrence. The

event itself was almost inconceivable. The woman testified to an event that broke the all compelling

frame of Auschwitz, where Jewish armed revolts just did not happen, and had no place. She testified to

the breakage of a framework. That was historical truth. (Felman and Laub 60)

Even though the woman was not telling the exact truth about the historical event, her

testimony was important, because it showed that the event had a great impact on her. It meant

more than just the explosion of a chimney. The narrator in The Things They Carried wants to

convince his readers that events can have more meaning than the facts, as in the example

above. The narrator shows that ――seemingness‖ is all we have‖ (Tegmark 216). The witness

can only give his or her personal account of the events, he or she can only describe how he or

she interpreted the experiences (Tegmark 214-20). Truth is given great importance, but in the

end we still have to accept that a witness cannot tell the exact truth. The narrator makes the

distinction between ―story-truth‖, the felt experience, and ―happening-truth‖ (TTTC 179), the

traditional notion of truth. Mats Tegmark, in In the Shoes of a Soldier: Communication in

Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam Narratives, explains that the story-truth communicates an emotion,

sensation, an experience. He adds that story-truth asks more of the reader than happening-

truth. In happening-truth the reader is passive and just receives a complete set of facts, in

story-truth, however, the reader reads the experiences and these experiences evolve in his

mind unconsciously (Tegmark 219). In The Things They Carried the narrator tells a story to

explain what he means by story-truth and happening-truth. As we have seen, almost every

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story in this novel is an example of how facts are less important than experience, but the

following story illustrates the distinction between the truths the best, and it shows how the

narrator confuses the reader. The story is told in the sections ―The Man I Killed‖ (TTTC 121-

25), ―Ambush‖ (TTTC 129-31), and ―Good Form‖ (TTTC 179-80). The narrator tells the

story of how he killed a Vietcong soldier. He describes how he looked when he was dead, and

he starts to invent the life of this soldier, by thinking about where he was born. He explains

that this boy never wanted to go and fight in the war. O‘Brien feels guilty for killing the boy,

and he makes his guilt worse by giving that boy a past and by making the soldier innocent. It

seems as if the Vietcong soldier was the same as O‘Brien, just a young man who had to fight

but did not want to. In the story ―Ambush ― the narrator explains that it was not necessary to

throw a grenade at the soldier, because he would have just passed by and he would have never

attacked them. It was not a life-threatening situation, but he killed him anyway. The narrator‘s

guilt increases, and he says that now, after the war, he still cannot forgive himself. The whole

story becomes complicated when in the story ―Good Form‖ he denies having killed the

soldier. He explains that the soldier was killed by someone else, but he was present and his

presence made him complicit. Afterwards he also denies this version. He explains what the

story-truth and the happening-truth is of this story:

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-

truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real

faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I‘m left with faceless

responsibility and faceless grief. Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man

of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his

throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him. (TTTC 179)

We still do not know what really happened, and this confuses the reader, but it does not

matter. We see how the stories help the narrator deal with his grief and that even if he did not

kill the Vietcong soldier, it does not make him less guilty. He ends this section with the

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affirmation that the different versions of the story are true. His daughter asks him if he ever

killed a man and he answers: ―I can say, honestly, ‗Of course not.‘ Or I can say, honestly,

‗Yes‘‖ (TTTC, 180).

Calloway argues that one of the most important elements of metafiction is the message (N.

pag.). Here an important message of the narrator is that ―stories can save us‖ (TTTC 221).

This sentence can be found in the final story of the book, ―The Lives of the Dead‖. In this

section he describes the death of a childhood friend Linda. He compares the death of this girl

with the deaths of the Vietnam War. He uses fiction to make the dead live again. This is the

power of fiction, according to the narrator: he can keep his friends alive by telling stories.

Calloway describes that this fiction brings together past, present and future:

Past, present, and future merge into one story as through fiction O'Brien zips "across the surface of . . .

[his] own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins . . . as Tim

trying to save Timmy's life with a story" (273). His story mirrors his own creative image of history, "a

blade tracing loops on ice" (265), as his metafictive narrative circles on three levels: the war of a little

boy's soul as he tries to understand the death of a friend, the Vietnam War of a twenty-three-year-old

infantry sergeant, and the war of "guilt and sorrow" (265) faced by "a middle-aged writer" (265) who

must deal with the past. (Calloway N. pag.)

In the previous chapter we have seen how the author O‘Brien establishes believability by

giving the different roles of the narrator great authority. When the reader begins to read the

novel the fictionality of the stories is emphasized (in the epigraph), but because of the

different roles of the narrator the reader will regard the narrator as trustworthy, which is very

confusing. We have seen that the narrator also begins to deny the truthfulness of the stories

and explains that everything he writes ultimately is fiction, by using phrases such as ―absolute

occurrence is irrelevant‖ (TTTC 79) and ―none of it happened‖ (TTTC 180). How does this

affect the reader? In In the Shoes of a Soldier: Communication in O’Brien’s Vietnam

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Narratives Mats Tegmark argues that the first reaction of the reader is one of frustration (219-

20). The reader feels tricked, because he or she was led to believe one thing only to find out

that it was all made up. The reader is frustrated, but it makes him or her think about larger

issues such as ―what is more true, happening-truth or story-truth‖ (Tegmark 220). Tegmark

explains that the reader is distanced from the ―physical realities‖, but he or she gets closer to

the ―mental experience‖ (Tegmark 220). The reader becomes aware of what stories are and

what they can do. It is important to note that when the narrator revokes the truth of the stories,

their power is not thereby taken away. The happening-truth may be gone, but the story-truth

remains. The stories are not disregarded just because the facts are not correct. Although the

reader‘s initial reaction is frustration, the revoking of the happening-truth makes the stories

stronger, for the reader will now think about larger issues than the question of truthfulness.

And this is exactly what the author wants to accomplish.

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Chapter 7: Style and the Use of Metaphor

The use of language of the characters, the soldiers, during the Vietnam War is very

remarkable, in that they use unemotional, harsh language when a horrible event occurs, for

instance when one of the soldiers dies. In Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of trauma

Kalí Tal argues that soldiers in wartime repress their emotions, except the emotion of anger,

because they do not want to be seen as feminine (141). Tal says that the military system

encouraged this alienation, away from feelings of caring and nurturing, for they reduced the

intimacy and grief of the soldiers. Those who showed these kind of caring emotions were

called ‗girls‘, ‗ladies‘. Soldiers wanted to show that they were hard and tough. The alienation

was expressed in phrases such as ―there it is‖ and ―it don‘t mean nothing‖ (Tal, Worlds of

Hurt 141). The use of unemotional language is also a way of distancing yourself from a

horrible event, so that it does not have a great impact on you. It is a form of self-protection

that will eventually fail, because this self-protective form of denial cannot reduce the

traumatic impact of a soldier‘s death. They try to pretend that death or horror does not hurt

them and that it is not a big deal, convincing themselves that it does not bother them. In The

Things They Carried the phrase ‗there it is‘ is also used, and there are more phrases that

distance the soldiers from the event. Sometimes there is nothing much to say than a simple

‗there it is‘, because there is nothing that can make the traumatic experiences more

understandable or less horrible. When for instance Lavender is shot, when returning back

from urinating, Kiowa makes a joke out of it. He says: ―Still zipping himself up. Zapped

while zipping‖ (TTTC 14). It makes it bearable for him, and the death does not seem very

real. Death is often turned into a joke just to cope, Owen W. Gilman Junior argues in his

contribution to Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature. He also

recognizes that jokes can create a community:

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To cope with death and its attendant anxiety, the soldiers of Vietnam had only the defensive mechanism

of jokes (a motif already noted in Hasford‘s novel). Jokes provided a life-support system in the war, and

sharing jokes forged a kind of desperate community, but the jokes made dark laughter, uncertain

laughter—laughter meant to keep the spectre of death at bay: […] No one should ever underestimate the

bonding capacity of humor. […] Yet Going After Cacciato shows that more, much more, than humor is

needed to keep a community live and well in the face of life‘s (and death‘s) challenges. (Gilman 136-

137)

Gilman rightly points out that humour will not be enough to protect a community from the

impact of death and horror. In The Things They Carried we find some more examples of jokes

and unemotional language. When Kiowa is dead, Azar describes his death in the shit field as

―wasted in the waste‖. The death of Curt Lemon is commented on Dave Jensen who sings

‗Lemon Tree‘ while they are picking Lemon‘s body parts from the tree (TTTC 78-79). This

joke is very cruel, and too horrible for O‘Brien, because he still remembers it years later.

O‘Brien himself explains the specific language use of soldiers.

There were numerous such poses. Some carried themselves with a sort of wistful resignation, others

with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humour or macho zeal. They were afraid of dying but

they were even more afraid to show it. They found jokes to tell. They used a hard vocabulary to contain

the terrible softness. Greased they‘d say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn‘t cruelty, just stage

presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn‘t quite dying, because in a curious way it

seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and

because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and to destroy the reality of death itself. They

kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs. They talked grunt lingo. (TTTC 16-17)

The soldiers made jokes to erase death, make death unreal. O‘Brien describes it well when he

says that irony mixes with tragedy, this is the feeling the reader experiences. But the denial of

the horrible reality is not only visible in their language, but also in their actions. In the story

―The Lives of the Dead‖ O‘Brien describes how the soldiers shook hands with a dead old

man, after they had burned down a village. They greeted the dead man which made him not

dead. There is an obvious denial of death. The protagonist is not able to shake hands, because

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he has not been in the war long enough. The others are hardened by the war and they need

these strategies to cope. The protagonist is there only for four days and he has still kept his

values from the normal civilian world. He sees the greeting of the dead as something horrible,

because the war has not yet undermined his values and principles. Later on during his tour of

duty O‘Brien will have the same coping strategies like all the other soldiers. O‘Brien

describes how he expects his listeners to react to a true war story, which is similar to how the

soldiers respond to horror: ―[…] there‘s nothing much to say about a true war story, except

maybe ‗Oh‘‖ (TTTC 75). The reader will not be able to say more than just ‗Oh‘, because there

is nothing that can explain or make you understand a true war story.

Kalí Tal argues that there is an important difference between the survivor reader and the non-

survivor reader of trauma literature. She uses Paul Fussel‘s idea that the distinction between

the two readers is the death of the metaphor, which creates a distance between the two (Tal,

Speaking the Language of Pain 124). In the article ―Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam

War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Trauma‖ Tal argues that the death of

metaphor is also the element distinguishing nonveteran writers from veteran writers. The

distinction between the two is crucial, because the two kinds of writers have a different

purpose in telling stories. The non-veteran writer has an ―urge to tell a story, make a point,

create an aesthetic experience, or move people in a particular way‖ (Tal, Speaking the

Language of Pain 226). Non-veteran writers see the war simply as a metaphor, it is way of

getting a certain message across. Here the war is a ―war of symbols and images‖ (Tal,

Speaking the Language of Pain 226). For veteran writers writing about war asks a personal

investment. In telling the war they try to establish new national or collective myths, but more

importantly they have to rebuild their personal myths that were shattered by the trauma (Tal,

Speaking the Language of Pain 226). Personal myth according to Kalí Tal is: ―the particular

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set of explanations and expectations generated by an individual to account for his or her

circumstances and actions‖ (Speaking the Language of Pain 225).The veteran‘s status as

survivor changes the motivation to write and the story told. For the veteran the Vietnam War

was a devastating reality and not a symbolic one. Later in the article she gives an example of

how a reality can be interpreted as symbol by the reader, but for the survivor it was a reality.

The example she gives comes from The Survivor in which Des Pres describes the ―literal

immersion of concentration camp victims into shit‖ (Tal, Speaking the Language of Pain

234). They were forced to wear, eat or swim in excrement, but it is especially the violation of

social and psychological boundaries that makes it so devastating for the survivor. He knows

he has to revise the personal myths, including the ―previously unthinkable‖ (Tal, Speaking the

Language of Pain 234). For the reader the immersion into shit is still a metaphor and it does

not break any personal myth (Tal, Speaking the Language of Pain 234). The narrator and the

author of The Things They Carried plays with the distinction between metaphor and reality.

The story of Kiowa who died in the excrement of a village in Vietnam can be seen as such a

double image. It is a metaphor, because it evokes the phrase ‗to be in deep shit‘ and it shows

the reader how awful war could be, how unbelievable. The image is also a reality, because

Kiowa has really died in this ‗village toilet‘. So for the narrator as survivor the scene is

everything but a metaphor, but you can see how the author plays with the distinction between

the two. O‘Brien explains that when he is writing he is not a soldier, but first of all a writer.

He thinks about what he will write and he wants to create a certain reaction with the reader.

He is aware of the distinction between the interpretation of a survivor and a non-survivor.

―When you‘re writing a book about Vietnam you don‘t think of yourself as a soldier. The

subject matter is war, and you‘re trying to make a sentence that is graceful, you‘re trying to

make a character come alive, you‘re trying to make a scene shake with meaning and also with

a dramatic feel; your attention is on writing that matters‖ (Naparsteck 11).

84

When Kiowa died, they searched for his body and one of the soldiers comments on the way

Kiowa died. Azar says ―‗Man talk about irony. I bet if Kiowa was here, I bet he‘d just laugh.

Eating shit – it‘s your classic irony.‘‖, and ―‗wasted in the waste,‘‖ (TTTC, 165). Azar is fully

aware of the irony of Kiowa‘s death. The soldiers see the metaphorical meaning of such

horrible events, but sadly enough for them it is not just a metaphor. The author emphasizes

the two meanings of Kiowa‘s death. He makes the reader aware that there is more to it than

symbol. We cannot claim that metaphor is dead in The Things They Carried, but the reader

learns also to go beyond the metaphor.

In The Things They Carried there is also a simple use of metaphor. In ―Speaking of Courage‖

for instance we can identify some important metaphors. Norman Bowker in this story

struggles to go back into the civilian life in his hometown. He does not feel at home. There is

a conflict between the reality of war and the reality of civilian life (Timmerman 102). Norman

Bowker has nothing to do and nowhere to go. He fills his time by travelling, driving around

the lake. ―Bowker seems trapped in a psychological clock, ticking off the meaningless hours‖

(Timmerman 106). Bowker is trying to reconstruct his present day life, by putting his past

realities together with things that might have been, which Timmerman calls ―imagined time‖

(Timmerman 106). But he soon realizes that he cannot escape the reality of the war.

―Speaking of Courage‖ shows the circular structure of replaying events, by letting Bowker

drive around in circles. He circles around a lake. Timmerman sees the lake and the circular

driving as a metaphor. The lake is described as flat, which reflects the way in which Bowker

the world: the world is flat and silent (Timmerman 107). Driving around the lake is ―an

aimless, circular travelling around a vast silence‖ (Timmerman 107). Timmerman also sees a

comparison with Bowker‘s mind that circles around three patterns of recollection. These

85

patterns are his prewar memory, recollection of war and imaginary confession. In his prewar

memory (Timmerman 107-108) the most important person is Sally Kramer, his childhood

sweetheart. She stands for ―things lost, the way things might have been‖ (Timmerman 107).

Bowker imagines that he has a conversation with her, but he realizes that he has nothing to

say to her. There is an enormous distance between him and her, in the same way as the town

seems distant and not as home. He finds it hard to express what he wants to say. Timmerman

characterizes his reaction by the sentence ‗No Problem‘. He denies his past in order to

survive. ―His aimless circling works then to demonstrate Norman Bowker‘s inability to settle

back into the routine of the World and exemplifies the psychological distance between his

former and present self‖ (Timmerman 108). The second pattern is that of the recollection of

war. He has a great need to speak of the war and he invents conversations to do this, as we

have seen before, but his war experience is always characterized by denial. In the third

pattern, the imaginary confession, he tells his story to an imaginary confessor figure, not to

real people. It is a conversation that takes place in a fantasy world.

We have seen earlier that when the Vietnam soldier came home from the war he felt isolated.

The trauma of the soldier is increased, because he is not welcomed as a hero and his desires to

be home do not live up to the expectations. He is changed by the war which makes home no

longer home. This feeling of alienation is expressed through metaphor and metonymy in The

Things They Carried. In the article ―‗Unraveling the Deeper Meaning‘: Exile and the

Embodied Poetics of Displacement in Tim O‘Brien‘s ―The Things They Carried‖‖ Tina Chen

tells us that for O‘Brien there is no such thing as an unproblematic return home. The Things

They Carried expresses a ―rootless existence of an exile‖(79). She says that the stories in the

novel are preoccupied with the ―nature of displacement and alienation‖(Chen 79-80). Tina

Chen describes exile as ―a fluid and inescapable experience resulting from immersion in the

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moral ambiguity of the Vietnam War‖ (80). In many Vietnam War novels the soldier is

described as being exiled from America, but O‘Brien has a new and different view on the

concept of exile. The exile of O‘Brien in the story is an alienation ―from his nation, his

friends, himself‖(Chen, 1998, 80), which is a typical form of exile for the returning soldier,

but he is also alienated from Vietnam. In O‘Brien‘s stories we can see an evolution in the

exile the protagonist experiences. The first concept of exile, the fear of exile, is mentioned

when the protagonist is thinking about escaping to Canada. Eventually O‘Brien returns home,

because he fears the exile from his family and the villagers. He had to live in exile in Canada

if he wanted to escape the war, but also the people back home would not understand his

decision, so he would be excluded by them. The second form of exile is the most obvious,

because the protagonist is alienated from America, from home, during the war. All the

characters in The Things They Carried desire to go back home and they also think that things

will go back to normal when they return to America. But as we know this return turns out to

be very problematic for some of the characters in the book, e.g. Bowker. The last form of

exile is the feeling of exile when returning from the war. This is, as mentioned above, the

exile from nation, family and friends and from Vietnam. Tina Chen discusses the exile from

Vietnam. The narrator in The Things They Carried is trying to reconstruct Vietnam with the

different stories. Chen compares this reconstruction of Vietnam to Salman Rushdie‘s concept

of ―homeland‖ (qtd. In Chen 80): when you are exiled from the homeland you must be aware

that the physical alienation means that you can never fully reclaim what you lost. With stories

you make fictions, imaginary homelands (Chen 80-81). There is a relationship between

―exilic longing and storytelling‖(Chen 81). Stories and the idea of return sustain each other.

The idea of return and the longing for return is a source for writing stories and the writing

stories makes a return possible, i.e. an imaginary return. The narrator in The Things They

Carried is aware that he can never return permanently to Vietnam, but there is a possibility of

87

―multiple returns, however fleeting or unstable, to the imaginative landscape of Vietnam‖

(Chen 81). In the stories the protagonist can fulfil his desire and return to Vietnam, but only

for a short time. Vietnam in the novel has a double meaning, because it is the ―place of

estrangement‖ and the ―ironic homeland‖ (Chen 81). So Vietnam is seen as a place of

alienation, but surprisingly also as a place of return. Chen argues that alienation becomes a

state of desire which makes the stories possible (81). Vietnam can be seen as a metaphor for

alienation, but also as a metaphor for home. For O‘Brien home is not an unambiguous place,

because it is situated both in Minnesota and in Vietnam, which consequently means that the

protagonist has no real place to call home and no place to feel completely at ease. The

potential for Vietnam as home is ―the ability of its fictive geography to generate new and

sustaining acts of creativity‖ (Chen 83). The imagined space of Vietnam as a metaphor for

home does not represent a point of origin, but rather a territory for ―self-generation and re-

creation‖ (Chen 84). Chen argues that it is Vietnam that emerges as the imagined homeland of

the book. And Vietnam as home is represented through bodies and the fictions, which here are

a metonymy, a part for the whole, for Vietnam (Chen 84). Metonymy is explained as a double

movement. Metonymy substitutes one term by using another one, but also recognizes that the

replacing term can never completely replace the replaced term. In The Things They Carried

bodies and stories are metonymic for Vietnam. (Chen 84) The relationship between bodies

and Vietnam is metaphorical and metonymical. The bodies described in the stories have been

deformed and disfigured by the war. ―The focus on the materiality of the body emerges as an

organic expression of war‖ (Chen 87). Although bodies and Vietnam are closely connected to

each other, there is an important difference between the two. Vietnam is depicted as very

vital, while the bodies that are described in the stories are mostly dead. But both the vitality of

Vietnam and the death of the bodies are a source for creating fiction. The bodies are dead, but

they are kept alive by telling stories, as is described in the section ―The Lives of the Dead‖

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(Chen88). The bodies are often described in detail and the body also has the ability to

transform. In the story ―Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong‖ we find a description of a girl that

flies over from the USA to visit her boyfriend. In the beginning she is described as an

innocent girl, she stands for everything the soldiers long for back home, but Vietnam changes

her completely. She begins to explore the land and learns to fight. Her body changes

completely. She looks stronger and she loses the more feminine and soft qualities. At night

she goes out on ambush with the Green Berets and she begins to kill. The land and the war

has completely changed her, physically and psychologically. The detailing of dead bodies

immediately shows a paradox in every story war, i.e. while emphasizing the horror of death,

the horror is elevated in an aesthetic moment. The irony of such a descriptions is that the

horrific experiences of Vietnam have a certain attraction (Chen 88-89). The narrator uses the

description of the bodies to point to something bigger, the descriptions go beyond the body.

Tina Chen explains that the mutilation of enemy bodies in war shows a fear and a desire to

deny the enemy a shared humanity, it means more than just taking apart bodies. Chen

describes how Vietnam ―emanates from the carefully attended bodies of the text‖ (Chen 89).

The bodies represent the complicated relationship O‘Brien has with Vietnam. He seems to

embrace Vietnam as an imaginary homeland, but at the same time he is conscious of his status

of ―displaced writer‖ (Chen 89). He has no real home, no real place to be at peace. Beside the

described bodies the stories of the novel can be seen as a metonym for Vietnam and they also

redeem the experience of displacement. Stories seem to give a purpose to the alienation. The

narrator is aware that there can never be ―a final resting place or a point of return‖ (Chen 94),

but it is this knowledge that gives the experience of displacement a teleological end. In The

Things They Carried the distinctions between stories, bodies, Vietnam and home are blurred.

When one of the elements is mentioned, the others are immediately evoked. It is impossible to

talk about anything in isolation. O‘Brien shows us that it is impossible to separate stories from

89

experience, reality from the imaginary. We have to go beyond the need for clarity. ―In

O‘Brien‘s war stories, the figurations of home/body/Vietnam/stories coalesce to produce an

awareness of how no single idea can be unravelled from the cloth woven by the connections

between each of them. It is a profound realization, leaving us to say, with wonder and a little

awe, ‗oh.‘‖ (Chen 96).

We can conclude that form and content in The Things They Carried are very close to each

other. The form reflects the themes of trauma of the novel. In a certain way we can use

Marshall McLuhan‘ notion of ―the medium is the message‖ (Federman). We have already

seen that Catherine Calloway says that the form of the book, the way in which he writes the

stories, is the message, the content. His style of writing is how others should write war stories.

He shows how it should be done. But we can also turn around this idea and make of it: the

message is the medium. In O‘Brien‘s The Things They Carried the content becomes the form.

Because the use of metaphor in the novel comes out of the realities of the war. The reality,

e.g. the immersion into shit, the reality of Kiowa‘s death, becomes a metaphor for the reader,

so the message becomes the medium.

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Conclusion

To which extent has Tim O‘Brien‘s coping with his Vietnam experience influenced his

novels, in style and content? This was the starting point of my dissertation. Therefore I have

studied the novel The Things They Carried on the basis of the theory of trauma.

By comparing the structure(s) of the short stories of The Things They Carried and the

characters in O‘Brien‘s novel to the symptoms and reactions described in the trauma theory I

came to the conclusion that Tim O‘Brien‘s novel reflects on trauma in form and content. The

theory of trauma is present in his stories, in the way that he gives his characters symptoms of

post-traumatic stress disorder, and the author shows how people react differently to trauma. In

O‘Brien‘s novel it is evident that the characters have experienced trauma and that they carry

the consequences of these experiences – one of ‗the things they carried‘ for the rest of their

lives.

Vietnam veterans were isolated from community when they returned from the war, and the

characters of the novel illustrate this. We have established that the narrator has a certain way

of coping with trauma, i.e. telling stories. Testimony is crucial in the recovery of a trauma

patient. The narrator creates a kind therapeutic relationship with the reader, in which he can

explain how he experienced Vietnam and what it did to him. Obviously this relationship is

one-sided, but for the narrator it is a way of coping.

The different stories of the novel imitate the reaction to trauma. We have seen how the author

creates confusion, so that the reader reacts similar to the stories just like the soldiers to the

war. The author will do everything to avoid certainty. The narrator blurs the line between fact

91

and fiction and he wants us to see that fiction can be more true than fact, because it reflects on

human experience. The author has given different characteristics to a good war story in his

novel and these characteristics can be found in the different stories.

The style of the novel indicates that the author is a trauma survivor, because the author

realizes that the notion of metaphor is dead with the survivor, but the style also shows that the

author is a true writer. He consciously plays with the notion of the death of the metaphor in

that he writes metaphors, real metaphors, but also metaphors that are ambiguous and he

emphasizes this ambiguity in order to make the reader see that there are more ways of

interpreting a metaphor. It can be seen as reality. So by talking about the consequences of

trauma and by recreating the reaction to trauma for the reader the author Tim O‘Brien wants

to show how a real story on war and trauma should be written and how the reader is to react to

it.

In my dissertation I have deliberately limited my study to one novel and to the theory of

trauma. On the basis of my findings it would be interesting to look at how this novel is

situated in the body of work of Tim O‘Brien. A future analysis for instance could look at how

The Things They Carried deviates from O‘Brien‘s other novels and short stories or how it

expands on his previous works. It can also be interesting to look at The Things They Carried

in the context of trauma literature and war literature, especially of the Vietnam War. I have

not compared this work to any other work about trauma or about war, so it would be good to

see how O‘Brien‘s novel is influenced by tradition and how he deviates from it.

92

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